AARNet launches SDN innovation platform for researchers using NoviFlow’s NoviSwitch
AARNet, Australia’s Academic and Research Network, today announced the launch of the Australia Wide-Area SDN Testbed, an innovation platform for developing high-speed technologies, established in collaboration with nine universities and CSIRO Data61. The announcement was made during the Open Networking Foundation SDN Down Under event in Sydney.
Based on open standards, the Testbed infrastructure consists of a core of four interconnected NoviFlow OpenFlow-enabled switches at AARNet backbone sites in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Seattle controlled by virtual machines (VMs) in Sydney and Melbourne.
David Wilde, AARNet’s Chief Technology Officer says access to a wide-area SDN testbed provides researchers with new opportunities to exploit the potential of SDN. These sites are being interconnected by AARNet to create a national wide-area SDN testbed environment with the ability to peer internationally with testbeds in the USA, Europe and elsewhere.
The four NoviFlow switches talk to the VM OpenFlow controllers, which are running ONOS software, developed by Open Networking Lab, and appear as a single distributed router – spread across 16,000km. Connectors from this AARNet core run out to SDN equipment (a similar set up of switches and servers) installed in the labs at the participating universities and CSIRO Data61.
With the AARNet core acting as a network exchange interconnecting the university SDN network domains, the setup simulates the Internet.
The Seattle presence enables AARNet to interconnect the testbed with similar testbeds operated by Internet2 and ESnet research networks in the United States, as well as with the global OpenFlow network facility recently deployed by ON.LAB, boosting opportunities for Australian researchers to run experiments with their US-based counterparts.