Image Credit: AARNet
AARNet, Australia’s Academic and Research Network has launched the Australia Wide-Area SDN Testbed in collaboration with nine universities and CSIRO's Data61, the largest data innovation group in Australia.
Led by the University of New South Wales (UNSW), these institutions have deployed SDN equipment within each of their labs and are being interconnected by AARNet to create a national wide-area SDN testbed environment, with the ability to peer internationally with testbeds in the USA, Europe and elsewhere.
The testbed infrastructure consists of a core of four interconnected NoviFlow OpenFlow-enabled switches at AARNet backbone sites in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Seattle controlled by virtual machines (VMs) in Sydney and Melbourne, said AARNet. The four switches talk to the VM OpenFlow controllers, which are running ONOS software, developed by Open Networking Lab, and appear as a single distributed router – spread across 16,000km. Connectors from this AARNet core run out to SDN equipment (a similar set up of switches and servers) installed in the labs at the participating universities and CSIRO Data61.
AARNet’s CEO Chris Hancock
The Testbed is a real-world research network environment, a simulation of the Internet that we’ve put in place to make it easier for researchers in the fields of computer science, engineering and mathematics to test, prototype and validate advanced networking concepts in the SDN arena and accelerate the development of high-speed networking.
Professor Sivaraman
At the campus level, we’re interested in how we can improve the user experience online by using SDN technology. We want to be able to distinguish between video content, for example, and a large data transfer from a research lab so that we can prioritize traffic.
