EARNEST Technical Study Kevin Meynell TERENA Bratislava 27 April 2007

The EARNEST Foresight Study Technical Sub-Study Areas Transmission Technologies –Equipment evolution, next-generation standards, transmission protocols & fibre provisioning. Control Plane Technologies –Switching & routing matrices (optical & IP), multicasting, IPvX, QoS provisioning. Operations and Performance –End-to-end performance, network management (optical & IP), VPN provisioning & PERT. Middleware –Authentication and authorisation infrastructures, mobility, PKI, support for network infrastructure, virtual organisations.

The EARNEST Foresight Study Technical Sub-Study Panel Lars Fischer (Nordunet) – Transmission John Graham (Indiana University) - Transmission Otto Kreiter (DANTE) - Transmission Gigi Karmous-Edwards (MCNC) - Control Plane (Optical) Alexander Gall (SWITCH) - Control Plane (IP routing) Stig Venaas (Uninett) - Control Plane (Multicast) Dimitra Simeonidou (University of Essex) – Operations & Performance (Optical) Luca Deri (University of Pisa/Netikos) - Operations & Performance (IP) Simon Leinen (SWITCH) - Operations & Performance (IP) Diego Lopez (RedIRIS) - Middleware Milan Sova (CESNET) - Middleware Klaas Wierenga (SURFnet) - Middleware (Mobility)

The EARNEST Foresight Study Completed and Scheduled Interviews Completed: –22/01/07MERLIN Radio Astronomers, Jodrell Bank, UK –30/01/07IBM, Teleconference –07/02/07Alcatel-Lucent, Teleconference –09/02/07Sun, Teleconference –1-2/03/07Juniper, Sunnyvale, USA –27-28/03/07 Cisco, San Jose, USA –29/03/07Force10, San Jose, USA –25/04/07Liberty Alliance, Brussels Scheduled: –28/04/08SxIP, Teleconference –11/05/07Calient, Paris –Alcatel-Lucent, Nortel, Ciena, DTU-COM (tba)

The EARNEST Foresight Study Preliminary Findings Caveat: So far only interviewed router & ethernet switching vendors. Interviews with carrier-class vendors still to come, and may tell different story.

The EARNEST Foresight Study Preliminary Findings Currently only a few OC-768 (40 Gbps) customers, mostly in oil and gas industries Reluctance to upgrade transport network to support 40 Gbps, as expensive (x20 the cost of 4 x 10 GE) and seen as interim step before higher speed standards. Running into problems with n x 10 Gbps, due to link aggregation and load-balancing performance. Cisco, Juniper and Force10 pushing for 100 Gigabit Ethernet standard. –Little interest in separate SDH-compatible WAN-PHY variants (<5% of sales) –100 GE standard expected by 2009, with implementations by –How to implement: 16 x 6.25, 10 x 10, 4 x 25, or 1 x 100 Gbps? –Copper standard for 100 GE being considered. –10 x 100 GE linecards and serial 100 GE possible by 2011.

The EARNEST Foresight Study Preliminary Findings Sun backing 40 GE, presumably due to PCI-X and Infiniband limitations. Some interest in SDH-compatible 80 Gbps (OC-1536) and 160 Gbps (OC-3072) standards. No mention of OC-256 (13 Gbps) or OC-384 (20 Gbps). 1 Tbps standard possible by Cisco pushing IP over DWDM. –Little need for traditional traffic aggregation (data and telephony) as services increasing provided by IP. –IP can provide much of the management and fault tolerance. –Reduction of equipment and processing needs, reducing per-port cost by up to 40%.

The EARNEST Foresight Study Preliminary Findings Equipment consolidation –Multi-terabit platforms with virtualised routing. – watts for typical 12 x 100/120 x 10 GE chassis. –Tunable transponders on router/switch interface cards. –Wider use of Reconfigurable Optical Add/Drop Multiplexers (ROADM). –10 GE expected to cost 1.5-2K per port by 2010.

The EARNEST Foresight Study Preliminary Findings Routing scalability becoming problematic (again). –Huge rise in number of hosts, fragmentation of service provider hierarchy, and amount of traffic. –Global routing table now >200,000 entries, which is causing memory and processing problems (0.5-1 GB memory required). –Other reasons – more multihoming, traffic engineering, plus IPv6. –Proposed to split IP addresses into identifiers and locators. [Possible implications for AAA as well] Improvements to TCP for sustained high-bandwidth transmissions. Juniper pushing (G)MPLS, but Cisco less interested.

The EARNEST Foresight Study Preliminary Findings In Europe different technologies used for higher education federations: –Liberty (ID-FF) –Shibboleth (SAML-based) –PAPI –A-Select In US: –Mainly Shibboleth Good news: SAML2.0 makes all of them inter- operable –Shib SAML2 version should be released within 6 months

The EARNEST Foresight Study Preliminary Findings Identity Management is big area of interest for vendors Different approaches to implement federations: –Identity Federations: Liberty Alliance and SUN –User centric-model Fairly new concept, implemented by Microsoft and OpenID –Abstract identity framework (Higgins, IBM) –Some alliances between vendors Probably to compete with Microsoft Trust is a big concern for vendors –The user centric approach seems to guarantee more privacy to the users

The EARNEST Foresight Study Remaining Work End-May:Outline report table-of-contents. Early-June:Interviews completed. June/July:Produce draft report. July:Technical Panel to meet to consider additions, modifications, and further recommendations. August:Final report published.