End-to-End Bandwidth Allocation and Reservation for Grid applications

Production Grid infrastructure requires end-to-end guarantees on the Quality of Service from the underlying networks. In this paper, we present use cases for advance network resource reservation and then describe a multi-layered architecture that can support them. The architecture presents a single bandwidth broker, called BAR, which sits at the Grid layer. BAR not only provides a single point of access to Grid applications to reserve guaranteed end-to-end bandwidth, but also presents its interface in application terms (instead of networking terms). We expose two guaranteed bandwidth services: the Guaranteed Delivery File Transfer and Virtual Leased Line services. Integrated with the GEANT2 bandwidth on demand infrastructure, our bandwidth broker deals with multiple network domains, further insulating the applications from network concerns. We also define additional components required for an end-to-end reservation as well as the interfaces between the components. Our deployed, prototype demonstrated the world's first software-based, inter-domain bandwidth reservations based on Premium IP.