Highly available network design and resource management of SINET4

Abstract

The Japanese academic backbone network has been providing a variety of multilayer network services to support a wide range of research and education activities for more than 700 universities and research institutions. The new version, called SINET4, was launched in 2011 in order to enhance the service availability and the network bandwidth as well as to expand the service menu. Its enhanced service availability was unexpectedly verified by the disastrous March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake, when the network managed not to stop service operation even after the earthquake. This paper describes the design and implementation of SINET4 in terms of multiple service provision, netPreliminary results for the contents of this paper have been presented at the international workshop on reliable network design and modeling (RNDM) 2011.

New Directions for a Japanese Academic Backbone Network

“…Every pair of the nodes is connected by a duplicated leased line, and every node is placed in a data center that is quake-resistant even to earthquakes of seismic intensity 7.0 and has a power supply capacity for at least 10 hours in case of blackouts. Thanks to this design, SINET4 survived the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011 and continued to offer a range of multi-layer services [32]. However, this leased line approach did not allow SINET4 to inexpensively upgrade the line speed in order to deliver ever-increasing traffic but did increase the latency due to carrier-class hitless-switching capability.…”

“…If both the primary and secondary MPLS-TP paths between the pair are down, the IP routers detect the down by the bidirectional forwarding detection (BFD) protocol, find the other routes by using OSPF for the Internet service, and establish the other MPLS paths by using the fast reroute (FRR) [39] for VPN services. As for quality of service (QoS) capabilities, IP routers and MPLS-TP devices will both have four queues and perform QoS control in accordance with the similar packet queueing and discarding algorithms to those of SINET4 [32].…”

“…SINET4 has offered layer-1 and layer-2 on-demand services similar to SDN services [32]. The layer-1 on-demand service receives user requests regarding destinations, durations, and path bandwidths via the portal system; calculates the best routes on a minimal-latency or maximum-bandwidth basis; manages the entire bandwidth assignment; and establishes the end-to-end paths.…”

“…The Science Information NETwork (SINET) [31], [32] operated by the National Institute of Informatics (NII) has offered a high-performance multi-layer network platform for Japanese academic communities, supported international projects with its international lines, and promoted secure private cloud services in collaboration with cloud service providers [33]. On-demand layer-1&2 services have dynamically offered end-to-end bandwidth for many projects and created international on-demand VPNs [21].…”

Disaster-Resilient Optical Network Survivability: A Comprehensive Survey

“…Disaster based failures can have devastating impacts on an optical network by making its services unavailable [7]. For example, the worst disaster in Japanese history was on 11 March 2011, consisting of Great East Japan earthquake of magnitude-9, along with the subsequent tsunami and nuclear accident that destroyed 1500 telecom buildings by the main shock and 700 telecom buildings experienced power outages [8][9][10]. The Nepal earthquake, in 2015, affected the Rural ICT infrastructure and services by collapsing of the houses, schools, ICT access centers, BTS, transmission towers, fiber backhaul, and microwave links [11,12].…”