PRAGMA-ENT: Exposing SDN Concepts to Domain Scientists in the Pacific Rim

TL;DR

PRAGMA-ENT is an international SDN testbed connecting multiple research institutions to facilitate experimentation and development of new networking ideas without affecting production networks.

Contribution

This paper details the establishment of PRAGMA-ENT, an international SDN testbed, and presents innovative control plane solutions like AutoVFlow for multi-controller coexistence.

Findings

Successfully established an international L2 SDN backbone

Evaluated control plane technologies, identifying limitations of FlowVisor

Developed AutoVFlow as a new approach for multi-controller management

Abstract

The Pacific Rim Application and Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA) is an international community of researchers that actively collaborate to address problems and challenges of common interest in eScience. The PRAGMA Experimental Network Testbed (PRAGMA-ENT) was established with the goal of constructing an international software-defined network (SDN) testbed to offer the necessary networking support to the PRAGMA cyberinfrastructure. PRAGMA-ENT is isolated, and PRAGMA researchers have complete freedom to access network resources to develop, experiment, and evaluate new ideas without the concerns of interfering with production networks. In the first phase, PRAGMA-ENT focused on establishing an international L2 backbone. With support from the Florida Lambda Rail (FLR), Internet2, PacificWave, JGN-X, and TWAREN, PRAGMA-ENT backbone connects Open\-Flow-enabled switches at University of Florida (UF), University of California San Diego (UCSD), Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST, Japan), Osaka University (Japan), National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST, Japan), and National Center for High-Performance Computing (Taiwan). The second phase of PRAGMA-ENT consisted of evaluation of technologies for the control plane that enables multiple experiments (i.e., OpenFlow controllers) to co-exist. Preliminary experiments with FlowVisor revealed some limitations leading to the development of a new approach, called AutoVFlow. This paper will share our experience in the establishment of PRAGMA-ENT backbone (with international L2 links), its current status, and control plane plans. Discussion on preliminary application ideas, including optimization of routing control; multipath routing control; and remote visualization will also be discussed.