GEANT is introducing SDN capabilities in the backbone with a Bandwidth on Demand (BoD) service. This service uses their DynPaC Framework, which offers dynamic and adaptive traffic engineering using path computation elements. DynPaC provides efficient use of network capacity, resiliency for link failures with quick recovery times, reduction of the operational costs of service management, and improved network monitoring by gathering and immediately acting on real-time information.
Figure 1: GEANT’s DynPaC Framework Implemented with OpenDaylight (Source: www.geant.org)
The DynPaC service manager acts as the coordinator, orchestrating the interactions between the other modules in the framework, and monitoring network events to determine how to best react to changing conditions. It introduces new services (moving flows to alternative paths if necessary), provides resiliency and fault recovery, and schedules services.
The Service Manager uses OpenDaylight’s Path Computation Element Protocol (PCEP), which obtains the physical topology and computes the shortest path between two network points, taking bandwidth constraints and scheduling information into consideration. The Service Manager and OpenDaylight then provide optimal path choices between source and destination nodes, prioritizing the routes to minimize the number of split flows.
GEANT is very active in the ODL community, contributing both original and maintenance code.