FABRIC Network Service Model

The FABRIC research infrastructure enables cuttingedge experimental networking research at-scale. Cen-tral to the FABRIC philosophy is providing researchers access to everywhere-programmable infrastructure including compute, storage, and networking connected with dedicated optical links deployed across more than 30 geographically distributed sites. At a high-level, each FABRIC site can be understood as a small cloud providing access to advanced computational hardware. One challenge to developing a novel faculty, such as FABRIC, is modeling the set of advanced networking services that are available to the user. The network services required by FABRIC users have several factors that contribute to this challenge including the need to experiment with layer 2 and layer 3 protocols spanning wide- and local-area networks, as well as dedicated connections to external ‘edge’ facilities such as other testbeds (Chameleon Cloud, CloudLab, and the PAWR testbeds), supercomputing centers, campus infrastructure, and other large instruments. This paper presents the FABRIC network services that enable users to experiment with complex network topologies. The work presented includes both the design and implementation of the control framework that instantiates network services on behalf of the user, as well as the efforts toward the FABLib library and JupyterHub environment that abstract the network services, simplifying the design and deployment of advanced networking topologies on FABRIC.

P. Ruth, I. Baldin, K. Thareja, T. Lehman, X. Yang and E. Kissel, “FABRIC Network Service Model,” , 2022, pp. 1-6, doi: 10.23919/IFIPNetworking55013.2022.9829810.