JRA1 Future Network
The overall objectives of JRA1 Future Network are to:
- Bring innovation to the basic infrastructure by investigating emerging technologies that enhance the network infrastructure and the corresponding portfolio of services offered by GÉANT and NRENs. Such technologies include:
- Carrier Class Transport technologies, such as Provider Backbone Transport (PBT) and Transport Multiprotocol Packet Label Switching (T-MPLS).
- Photonic equipment based on the state of art Photonic Switching.
- Examine and envisage new architectural paradigms applicable to backbone networks with the objective of optimising the use of resources deployed. Such studies will include:
- Control plane and management.
- Virtualisation services.
- Protocol layering and scaling.
The expected results of JRA1 are to produce a set of reports that will be used as reference documents for GN3 and NRENs when designing their next-generation networks and services. In addition, it is expected that this work will influence the technical roadmaps of equipment vendors based on requirements from the GN3 community and the findings of this work.
| Task | Name | Description |
| Task1 | Core Network Technologies | This Task will research the exploitation of the hybrid infrastructure by emerging connection-oriented transport technologies in order to support point-to-point, point-to-multipoint and VPN services. |
| Task2 | Photonics | This Task will investigate emerging technologies that enhance the network infrastructure and the corresponding portfolio of services offered by GÉANT and NRENs, and examine and envisage new architectural paradigms applicable to backbone networks with the objective of optimizing the use of resources deployed. |
| Task3 | Federated Network Architectures | This Task will study alternative network architectures and investigate how effectively they can support the various multi-domain network and services that are planned to be ubiquitously supported by the GN3 community, thereby arriving at a set of recommendations for the architectural design of both single- and multi-domain network infrastructures and services. The work will not be limited to technical aspects, but will also examine organisational and administrative aspects of new architectural paradigms. It will build on cross-border fibre and multi-domain coordination efforts started in GN2 as well as network stitching work done in PHOSPHORUS and elsewhere. In addition there will be the specification of a test case, based on the report findings, to create a sample multi-domain architecture involving a limited number of NRENs interconnected via cross-border fibres. |
| Task4 | Virtualisation | This Task will start analysing the current and possible uses of virtualisation in a single-domain environment, e.g. virtualisation of node and transport service resources, and the possibility of creating virtual sets of resources, including computational elements. At an early stage effort should be made to identify potential users. Following this, the architecture of a single virtual domain based on virtual resources from a multi-domain service will be examined. The advantages of such an architecture from a network, operations, and user perspective will be investigated. The findings will be used to specify the requirements of a single virtual-domain prototype followed by a hands-on test case. |
