3rd International ICST Conference on Broadband Communications, Networks, and Systems

Research Article

The DRAGON Project and Application Specific Topologies

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/BROADNETS.2006.4374347,
        author={Fiona Leung and Jaroslav Flidr and Chris Tracy and Xi Yang and Tom Lehman and Bijan Jabbari and Don Riley and Jerry Sobieski},
        title={The DRAGON Project and Application Specific Topologies},
        proceedings={3rd International ICST Conference on Broadband Communications, Networks, and Systems},
        publisher={IEEE},
        proceedings_a={BROADNETS},
        year={2006},
        month={10},
        keywords={},
        doi={10.1109/BROADNETS.2006.4374347}
    }
    
  • Fiona Leung
    Jaroslav Flidr
    Chris Tracy
    Xi Yang
    Tom Lehman
    Bijan Jabbari
    Don Riley
    Jerry Sobieski
    Year: 2006
    The DRAGON Project and Application Specific Topologies
    BROADNETS
    IEEE
    DOI: 10.1109/BROADNETS.2006.4374347
Fiona Leung1, Jaroslav Flidr1, Chris Tracy1, Xi Yang2, Tom Lehman2, Bijan Jabbari3, Don Riley4, Jerry Sobieski1
  • 1: Mid-Atlantic Crossroads
  • 2: USC / Information Sciences Insitute- East
  • 3: George Mason University
  • 4: University of Maryland

Abstract

A new breed of network intensive "e-science" applications are emerging that require a new perspective on how networks provide resources to the user. These e-science applications often have large raw capacity requirements (tens of gigabits/second) and require global reach. The discipline scientists expect this type of performance to be deterministic and repeatable, and available in conjunction with other resources such as sensors, instruments, computational clusters, storage arrays, and the like. The DRAGON project, an NSF funded testbed in the Washington DC metropolitan area, has been developing open source generalized multi-protocol label swapping (GMPLS) based service concepts that provide dedicated and deterministic network resources to the e-science application. Using the GMPLS control plane and DRAGON extensions, an entire "application specific topology" can be established in an automated fashion across administrative boundaries, across heterogeneous network technologies, and can be instantiated in seconds rather than weeks or months. This paper describes the technologies being developed by the DRAGON project and some of the ways application specific topologies are being applied to advanced networked applications.