Democratizing Network Reservations through Application-Aware Orchestration

The provisioning of network connections for data transfers that provide quality of service (QoS) over research and education (R&E) networks is currently performed by network operators. For network connections that span multiple administrative domains, network operators have to reach agreements on reservation requirements. As a result, a network reservation request may take from days to weeks to be provisioned. To improve provisioning times and the success rate of multidomain network reservations, we designed and implemented an application-aware orchestration framework for multidomain R&E networks. This framework leverages latest developments in software-defined networking to automate network provisioning in order to democratize access to network reservation through novel APIs. We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of our application-aware orchestration framework. We evaluate our system using Mininet and demonstrate that it provisions 49% more reservations than current state-of-the-art systems within seconds of receiving a request.