Period: Through July 2012

1. Major accomplishments

1. Milestones achieved

S4.a: Acquire and test 3 Brocade switches and supporting equipment for a 10Gbps OpenFlow regional network. Review network design with GENI participants.

S4.b: Deploy switches and bring up test connections to NLR, Internet2, and two early deployment CENIC research universities for testing of physical connectivity. Status:

The Brocade equipment has been received and deployed to the field, along with the Cisco optronics providing 10GE connectivity between them. As of this writing, the Brocade beta code providing OpenFlow support contains a significant bug rendering it effectively incapable of interoperating with non-OpenFlow-enabled Layer-2 networks such as NLR’s FrameNet and CENIC’s HPR-L2. As a result, although COTN is extant as a stand-alone OpenFlow network, no useful research can be conducted on it in its present state.

FOAM and FlowVisor services are in place.

2. Deliverables made

GEC Attendance:

Although GEC14 was scheduled during CENIC’s annual Board of Directors retreat (at which the attendance of the PI, CENIC’s Chief Technical Officer, was required), CENIC was represented at the GEC by Erick Sizelove, lead engineer for the deployment of COTN.

1. Description of work performed during last quarter

1. Activities and findings

During the reporting period, effort has centered around deployment of the network as well as finalizing the design for interconnections with Internet2 and NLR. Significant difficulties have been encountered with the Brocade pre-beta and beta OpenFlow code. Initial efforts to facilitate a demo for GEC14 were hindered by the lack of functionality in the pre-beta code to rewrite source IP addresses. Subsequently, a major bug was found in the beta code in which VLAN tags were inappropriately stripped, rendering COTN incapable of interoperating with non-OpenFlow networks such as NLR’s FrameNet and CENIC’s HPR-L2, both essential access mechanisms for the planned use of COTN. Brocade anticipates a bug fix for the latter issue in August 2012.

2. Project participants

Dave Reese (Principal Investigator and Chief Technology Officer, CENIC)

Brian Court (Director, Network Engineering and Design, CENIC)

Erick Sizelove (Associate Director, Core Engineering, CENIC)

3. Publications (individual and organizational)

No formal publications were funded by the project during the reporting period.

4. Outreach activities

Our outreach activities at this time are centered around collaboration with other GENI regional and national infrastructure providers. We have also had extensive meetings with Dr. Katia Obraczka of UC Santa Cruz in an effort to facilitate the use of COTN in her Anonyflow research, as well as network staff at UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, the California Institute of Technology, the University of Southern California, and Stanford University.

5. Collaborations

During the deployment of COTN and discussions centering around its interconnection with national GENI infrastructure, we have had extensive collaborations with many in the GENI community. These have included the following:

Tim Upthegrove, Heidi Picher Dempsey, Chaos Gulibitsky, Joshua Smift (GPO)

Peter O’Neill (National Lambda Rail)

Tom Johnson (Indiana University)

Nick Bastin (Stanford University)

These collaborations greatly facilitated not only the work funded by this grant but concurrent work done to assume support of NLR’s GENI infrastructure.

6. Other Contributions

None