1. OBGP: A mechanism for optical peering and lightpath trading George M. Porter Sahara Retreat UC Berkeley January 2002

2. Optical Border Gateway Protocol An extension to BGP that allows optical cross-connects (OXCs) to be automatically configured as BGP speakers These OXCs can peer with their neighbors in other administrative domains using BGP protocol OBGP gives domains the ability to easily transit peer traffic across their network OBGP provides a mechanism to trade lightpaths on the open market Developed as part of the Canada’s CA*net 3 research and education network, designed by Canarie, Inc. This poster is designed to present their work and get feedback on alternative environments that would benefit from it.

3. Case for lightpath trading There is huge amount of dark fiber that remains unused Traditionally, customers buy lit fiber from a major ISP By lighting dark fiber themselves, customers can have more flexible, cheaper possibilities Groups of neighboring networks can trade lightpaths between themselves Possibilities: QoS offered by dedicated optical channels ISPs can transit traffic from peers dynamically, as needed (per agreement) Construction of high-speed links between data producer (e.g. radio telescope) and data consumer (e.g. classroom)

4. Applications Distributed research/educational networks Dial-in additional bandwidth as needed “Customer-Empowered Networks”: Groups of cooperating networks can control routes through neighboring networks, reducing or eliminating the need for transiting traffic through upstream ISPs. Novel peering arrangements: by placing virtual BGP processes in other administrative domains, networks can peer with each other through an intermediate network without knowledge of the intermediate LRAs can provide a limited view of an ISP’s network, giving customers the ability to control routes through the ISP cloud, while hiding the network’s true structure

5. Mechanism Put OXC under control of the router OXC Upon receiving incoming BGP OPEN messages, an OBGP router can spawn a new virtual BGP process that corresponds to a port on the OXC The neighboring network can now independently establish a peering relationship with this virtual router, forming an optical lightpath through the OXC

6. OXC BGP OPEN OXC Virtual Router AS 123 AS 456 AS 123 BGP OPEN AS 456 BGP OPEN message sent to router with information about optical capabilities A virtual BGP process is spawned A BGP session is initiated independently with new BGP process The virtual process (running on the router) configures the OXC to switch the proper optical wavelengths 1) 2)

7. The Lightpath Route Arbitrator (LRA) The LRA can act as a central speaker for the network, controlling multiple switches and dispatching incoming BGP requests The LRA is a convenient point of instrumentation, measurement, and enforcement of policy agreements An outside broker could form an end-to-end lightpath across network boundaries by talking with LRAs LRA OXC Other networks

8. Future Work Definition of service and trading policies Mechanisms (especially at the LRA) to instrument, measure, and enforce service policies Scalability issues: to date only tested on 8x8 switch Feedback: Outside of crossbar-type research networks, what environments would benefit?

9. Further Information CA*net3 information – http://www.canet3.net/opti cal/optical.html http://www.canet3.net/opti cal/optical.html OBGP information – http://obgp.canet3.net/  -grid research network – http://dsl.cs.uchicago.edu/beta/ http://dsl.cs.uchicago.edu/beta/ Globus computational grid – http://www.globus.org