EARNEST Technical Study

Kevin MeynellTERENABratislava

27 April 2007

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Technical Sub-Study Areas

• Transmission Technologies– Equipment evolution, next-generation standards, transmission

protocols & fibre provisioning.

• Control Plane Technologies– Switching & routing matrices (optical & IP), multicasting, IPvX,

QoS provisioning.

• Operations and Performance– End-to-end performance, network management (optical & IP),

VPN provisioning & PERT.

• Middleware– Authentication and authorisation infrastructures, mobility, PKI,

support for network infrastructure, virtual organisations.

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Technical Sub-Study Panel

Lars Fischer (Nordunet) – Transmission

John Graham (Indiana University) - TransmissionOtto Kreiter (DANTE) - TransmissionGigi Karmous-Edwards (MCNC) - Control Plane (Optical)Alexander Gall (SWITCH) - Control Plane (IP routing)Stig Venaas (Uninett) - Control Plane (Multicast)Dimitra Simeonidou (University of Essex) – Operations & Performance (Optical)Luca Deri (University of Pisa/Netikos) - Operations & Performance (IP)Simon Leinen (SWITCH) - Operations & Performance (IP)Diego Lopez (RedIRIS) - MiddlewareMilan Sova (CESNET) - MiddlewareKlaas Wierenga (SURFnet) - Middleware (Mobility)

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Completed and Scheduled Interviews

• Completed:

– 22/01/07MERLIN Radio Astronomers, Jodrell Bank, UK

– 30/01/07IBM, Teleconference

– 07/02/07Alcatel-Lucent, Teleconference

– 09/02/07Sun, Teleconference

– 1-2/03/07 Juniper, Sunnyvale, USA

– 27-28/03/07 Cisco, San Jose, USA

– 29/03/07Force10, San Jose, USA

– 25/04/07Liberty Alliance, Brussels

• Scheduled:

– 28/04/08SxIP, Teleconference

– 11/05/07Calient, Paris

– Alcatel-Lucent, Nortel, Ciena, DTU-COM (tba)

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Preliminary Findings

Caveat:

So far only interviewed router & ethernet switching vendors.

Interviews with carrier-class vendors still to come, and may tell different story.

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Preliminary Findings

• Currently only a few OC-768 (40 Gbps) customers, mostly in oil and gas industries

• Reluctance to upgrade transport network to support 40 Gbps, as expensive (x20 the cost of 4 x 10 GE) and seen as interim step before higher speed standards.

• Running into problems with n x 10 Gbps, due to link aggregation and load-balancing performance.

• Cisco, Juniper and Force10 pushing for 100 Gigabit Ethernet standard.– Little interest in separate SDH-compatible WAN-PHY variants

(<5% of sales)

– 100 GE standard expected by 2009, with implementations by 2010.

– How to implement: 16 x 6.25, 10 x 10, 4 x 25, or 1 x 100 Gbps?

– Copper standard for 100 GE being considered.

– 10 x 100 GE linecards and serial 100 GE possible by 2011.

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Preliminary Findings

• Sun backing 40 GE, presumably due to PCI-X and Infiniband limitations.

• Some interest in SDH-compatible 80 Gbps (OC-1536) and 160 Gbps (OC-3072) standards.

• No mention of OC-256 (13 Gbps) or OC-384 (20 Gbps).

• 1 Tbps standard possible by 2020.

• Cisco pushing IP over DWDM.

– Little need for traditional traffic aggregation (data and telephony) as services increasing provided by IP.

– IP can provide much of the management and fault tolerance.

– Reduction of equipment and processing needs, reducing per-port cost by up to 40%.

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Preliminary Findings

• Equipment consolidation

– Multi-terabit platforms with virtualised routing.

– 5000-7000 watts for typical 12 x 100/120 x 10 GE chassis.

– Tunable transponders on router/switch interface cards.

– Wider use of Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexers (ROADM).

– 10 GE expected to cost 1.5-2K per port by 2010.

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Preliminary Findings

• Routing scalability becoming problematic (again).

– Huge rise in number of hosts, fragmentation of service provider hierarchy, and amount of traffic.

– Global routing table now >200,000 entries, which is causing memory and processing problems (0.5-1 GB memory required).

– Other reasons – more multihoming, traffic engineering, plus IPv6.

– Proposed to split IP addresses into identifiers and locators. [Possible implications for AAA as well]

• Improvements to TCP for sustained high-bandwidth transmissions.

• Juniper pushing (G)MPLS, but Cisco less interested.

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Preliminary Findings

• In Europe different technologies used for higher education federations:– Liberty (ID-FF)– Shibboleth (SAML-based)– PAPI– A-Select

• In US:– Mainly Shibboleth

• Good news: SAML2.0 makes all of them inter-operable– Shib SAML2 version should be released within 6 months

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Preliminary Findings

• Identity Management is big area of interest for vendors

• Different approaches to implement federations:– Identity Federations: Liberty Alliance and SUN – User centric-model

• Fairly new concept, implemented by Microsoft and OpenID

– Abstract identity framework (Higgins, IBM)– Some alliances between vendors

• Probably to compete with Microsoft

• Trust is a big concern for vendors– The user centric approach seems to guarantee more

privacy to the users

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Remaining Work

• End-May: Outline report table-of-contents.

• Early-June: Interviews completed.

• June/July: Produce draft report.

• July: Technical Panel to meet to consider additions, modifications, and further

recommendations.

• August: Final report published.