The Works of DANTE - Issue 4

GÉANT2 Developers Meeting held at DANTE

A PACE developers meeting was held at DANTE recently to work on the GÉANT2 PIP (Premium IP) Provisioning System. PACE, developed within the Service Activities of GÉANT2, is concerned with End-to-End Quality of Service on the network. The aim of the service is to provide guarantees on bandwidth and other networking parameters that may affect performance, across one or more interconnected domains. It will develop a provisioning system that allows users to request a given class of service for IP, end-to-end.

It is expected that the primary beneficiaries of a PIP Provisioning Service will be users of applications with real time constraints, such as video conferencing and remote control.

Service provisioning has previously been available on GÉANT, but the challenge now is to extend this facility to a multi-domain environment, which would really be of benefit to the end user. This activity will extend PIP service provisioning to NRENs and other networks by developing the provisioning mechanisms and policy for the allocation of PIP. The system being developed, when deployed in participating domains, will provide an automated procedure for requesting and delivering the PIP service.

The system will be developed and deployed in phases, with new features being added in each phase. It is hoped that a basic “version 1” of the provisioning service will be ready for the end of October.

Also included in the work of PACE is the development of a distributed performance monitoring system which is able to determine if service guarantees are being met, and can be used to diagnose performance problems.

The activity has already created the Performance Enhancement and Response Team (PERT), a virtual team whose purpose is to help investigate and resolve any system performance problems a user is experiencing.

An interview with one of the PERT Managers appeared in the last edition of The Works of DANTE.