Enhancing ESnet's OSCARS Path Computation Engine

The Department of Energy (DOE) supports scientific collaboration in six program areas, ranging from nuclear physics, to biological and environmental research. To enable these data intensive large scale collaborations, the Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) is used to move upwards of 50 Petabytes a month between sites within the US and Europe. Bandwidth within ESnet can be requested, reserved, and utilized through the On-demand Secure Circuits and Advance Reservation System (OSCARS), which provisions network resources with guaranteed bandwidth over a known reservation schedule. Traditionally, OSCARS has only supported simple point-to-point connections between endpoints (e.g. universities, research laboratories), which has limited how efficiently the network may be harnessed by users. This paper details recent extensive enhancements prototyped for OSCARS, to be incorporated into a future release, which enable users to select novel service types including survivability, asymmetric bandwidth or routes, and anycast/manycast. We quantitatively compare several of these enhancements to the baseline point-to-point service, and find that the new services provide not only greater flexibility for the end-user, but savings for network administrators in terms of blocking and network resource usage as well.