High Level Description
The Bandwidth-on-demand (BoD) service is an end-to-end, point-to-point bidirectional connectivity service for data transport using Ethernet technology. The BoD service allows users and applications to reserve bandwidth on demand between the end points participating in the BoD service. The data transport capacity dedicated to a connection can range from 1 Mbps up to 10 Gbps in steps of 1 Mbits/s.
The service is offered collaboratively by GÉANT and a set of adjacent domains (NRENs or external partners) that adhere to the requirements of the service. These joint networks form a multi-domain area where the service is provided.
The service is designed for situations where users have frequent transfer of large data sets between two end points. The data transport capacity is negotiable per request and is either accepted or rejected when the request is made depending on the available resources. The service offers a high security level in the sense that the carried traffic is isolated from other traffic. It has to be noted that the traffic is isolated at logical layer and not necessarily at physical layer. It means that the core network will carry data from multiple users, but there will be no "crosstalk" between this traffic streams. From the users' perspective, each instance of the service is a virtual circuit between the two end points among which the traffic is exchanged in a manner isolated from other data flowing within the involved networks. The bandwidth offered by the service is not over subscribed in any of the networks carrying the traffic hence making it possible to delivered deterministic service in terms of throughput capabilities.
The service is offered as per demand connections with a small lead time.
The end points of the connection will be selected when the connection is reserved by the user or application.
For the operation of the service a monitoring tool that tracks the availability of the connections is provided to the users. In addition, a service support structure (GÉANT Service Desk) can be used for problem resolution and other means.
Figure 1 Multi-domain architecture for data transmission from “A” to “Z”
Bandwidth on Demand services in a nutshell:
The service offers data transmission from end point “A” to “Z” (Figure 1). End users who are connected to an NREN that offers the BoD service are able to make on demand data transfers with deterministic performance to other end users with similar capabilities. The connection to the NREN through regional or campus networks can be done using a static assigned connection (typically VLANs). This means that the end user h to have one connection established permanently, but hereafter the connections can be established on demand, i.e. dynamically.
The BoD service can be very useful when researchers (end users) want to exchange data in a deterministic way (e.g. specified bandwidth) with multiple researchers at other locations who have access to the service. This service is useful for high performance computing centers, radio-astronomy, particle physics and bioinformatics.