GLIF/OGF Techs 'meuse' standards in Maastricht
14 June 2013 - A joint meeting of the GLIF Technical Working Group and the OGF NML and NSI Working Groups was held on 6-7 June 2013 in Maastricht, The Netherlands in conjunction with TNC 2013. This aimed to progress work on common service specifications and consider future technical directions for lambda grids.
The Open Grid Forum (OGF) Network Services Interface (NSI) Working Group has developed a protocol to support automatic creation and management of global dynamic lightpaths. This protocol is supported by the Network Markup Language (NML) Working Group that has developed a standardised way of describing the capabilities of network devices and the means to exchange this information between network providers. The meeting reported significant progress towards finalisation of version 2 of the NSI Connection Service protocol and the associated NML topology model.
The AutoGOLE pilot which utilises NSI and NML for dynamic lightpath set-up and tear-down, has now been rolled-out on fourteen GLIF Open Lightpath Exchanges (GOLEs) around the world. The next phase is to trial a fully-meshed network, provisioning support for OpenFlow, and considering the integration of identity management federations for authorisation and access management.
There were also discussions about the Interdomain OpenFlow demonstration between StarLight (Chicago) and NetherLight (Amsterdam) with a view to establishing a OpenFlow path from the Asia-Pacific region to Europe via North America. Similiarly, OpenFlow was being used to enable SDN over Internet2's 100 GE backbone, and on the EU-Japan FELIX testbed.
GLIF is considered a very important activity within the TERENA portfolio and TERENA will continue to support this work through provision of the GLIF Secretariat. As Valentino Cavalli, Acting Secretary-General said:
"TERENA has been providing the GLIF Secretariat since the very beginning, and we are quite keen on supporting the worldwide development of lambda networking in the future as part of TERENA's global presence."
The next Technical Working Group meeting will be held on 3-4 October 2013 in Singapore (see http://www.singaren.net.sg/glif.php)