As demands on campus networks - many driven by science and engineering disciplines - intensify, traditional network management approaches are increasingly obsolete. Researchers often require network paths with higher throughput, increased security, and/or perimeter firewall bypass. Network operators traditionally have accommodated a few research users by provisioning dedicated resources. Previous approaches for addressing requests for special connectivity to regional and national facilities have not scaled well.
At the University of Utah, a research team is upgrading part of the campus network with technology originally developed for a national network research testbed (NSF GENI). This "sliceable network" model allows multiple virtual networks to be established in parallel over the same equipment. Each resulting science slice may have different characteristics and may connect to distinct resources either on or off campus. This allocation scheme may incorporate computational and storage resources in addition to network paths. With hardware supporting emerging Software Defined Networking standards, these slices can be controlled to very fine granularity. This technology inherently supports dynamic slice creation to enable on-demand network resource allocation for researchers.
This work provides an abstraction to insulate multiple high-intensity users cleanly in a campus network. The ensuing intellectual merit follows from applying a research focused network management approach more broadly to part of a large production environment. For broader impact, a connection to the University?s undergraduate honors residence allows this innovative cohort to interact directly with the sliced network and also pursue guided experimentation. The core software base and project-specific enhancements are available under open-source licensing.
