Simeonidou, Dimitra wrote:
-Dimitra: ghpn should open its consideration to wider user communities (not only lambda service users) and look at scaling capabilities and interfacing issues of different technologies. i.e. the heterogenity considerations should also extend to mobile/wireless domains.
Dimitra, thanks! Quite a few suggestions actually; I'm sorry to have left them out (at least, now the best is saved till last). I think your comment on scalability is particularly dead on. Today, I've seen an impressive list of control planes, including multi-domain control planes. Unfortunately, I do not think any will scale to the scale of the Internet. AutoBAHN and Phosphorous for example have a database of all domains and their interrelation. The same applies for interdomain GMPLS. To quote RFC 4655 (section 4.9.1), about the scalability of GMPLS: "[the path computation architecture] is not considered to be a solution that is applicable to the entire Internet. That is, the applicability of [this architecture] is limited to a set of domains with known relationships." I think this statement applies for all control planes at the moment. With NDL, we have created a distributed topology database. However, that is only part of the scaling problem. Other solutions may include abstraction of multiple domains, hierarchy of addressing (such as IP addresses). Remember that the number of constraints is a lot larger though: topology constraints, technology constraints, scheduling constrains, policy constraints, etc. And that's just for network resources, ignoring computing and storage resources that a meta-scheduler needs to take into account. I think this is a worthwhile research topic, and the timing is right. It has been shown that multi-domain control planes are possible. Now is the time to investigate if this can scale up to 1000s of domains. Regards, Freek Dijkstra