Intra and Interdomain Circuit Provisioning Using the OSCARS Reservation System

With the advent of service sensitive applications such as remote controlled experiments, time constrained massive data transfers, and video-conferencing, it has become apparent that there is a need for the setup of dynamically provisioned, quality of service enabled virtual circuits. The ESnet on-demand secure circuits and advance reservation system (OSCARS) is a prototype service enabling advance reservation of guaranteed bandwidth secure virtual circuits. OSCARS operates within the energy sciences network (ESnet), and has provisions for interoperation with other network domains. ESnet is a high-speed network serving thousands of Department of Energy scientists and collaborators worldwide. OSCARS utilizes the Web services model and standards to implement communication with the system and between domains, and for authentication, authorization, and auditing (AAA). The management and operation of end-to-end virtual circuits within the network is done at the layer 3 network level. Multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) and the resource reservation protocol (RSVP) are used to create the virtual circuits or label switched paths (LSP's). quality of service (QoS) is used to provide bandwidth guarantees. This paper describes our experience in implementing OSCARS, collaborations with other bandwidth-reservation projects (including interdomain testing) and future work to be done.