A service oriented network architecture suitable for global grid computing

Abstract

Grid computing frameworks built on top of the TCP/IP protocol stack are efficient in local area net- works (LANs), where almost dedicated network resources are available. Supporting distributed grid computing applications connected by Wide Area Networks (WANs), i.e. global grid computing, represent a more challenging task that requires the availability of network protocols capable of guaranteeing Quality of Service (QoS). In this paper we propose to utilize a Service Oriented Automatic Switched Transport Network (SO-ASTN) as the transport infrastructure for supporting global grid computing. The SO-ASTN consists of the addition to the plain ASTN of an extra layer, namely the service plane, designed according to the ITU-T Intelligent Network Conceptual Model. The main novelty of the architecture is the network awareness that grid computing applications are provided with. Global grid computing applications can therefore experience LAN QoS level in a Wide Area Network (WAN) scenario. We introduce a testbed, named SOON (Service Oriented Op- tical Network), for the evaluation of the proposed architecture. As network awareness use case we propose an implementation, in SOON, of the virtual topology request by utilizing Extensible Markup Language (XML) as an information exchange format.