Towards an SDN-based bandwidth on demand service for the European research community

Geant, the pan-European Research and Education Network (REN) is working on a Software-Defined Networking (SDN) solution to improve the provisioning of the Bandwidth on Demand (BoD) service. The SDN-based solution will integrate with the current provisioning tool, AutoBAHN, to add support for OpenFlow domains. One of the main benefits of this approach is that the solution will still be compliant with the Network Services Interface (NSI-CS) protocol to support multi-domain service provisioning. The core element of the solution is the Dynamic Path Computation (DynPaC) framework, an advanced reservation system for OpenFlow domains that allows the establishment of resilient Layer 2 services with bandwidth and VLAN constraints. This paper presents all the phases in the deployment of this SDN solution: the functional requirements definition, the evaluation of OpenDaylight and ONOS to select the appropriate network operating system, and the evolution of the DynPaC framework from its first implementation to the future integration in ONOS.