[GHPN-WG] Scalability

[Freek Dijkstra]

Simeonidou, Dimitra wrote:

> -Dimitra: ghpn should open its consideration to wider user
> communities (not only lambda service users) and look at scaling
> capabilities and interfacing issues of different technologies. i.e.
> the heterogenity considerations should also extend to mobile/wireless
> domains.

Dimitra, thanks! Quite a few suggestions actually; I'm sorry to have 
left them out (at least, now the best is saved till last). I think your 
comment on scalability is particularly dead on.

Today, I've seen an impressive list of control planes, including 
multi-domain control planes. Unfortunately, I do not think any will 
scale to the scale of the Internet. AutoBAHN and Phosphorous for example 
have a database of all domains and their interrelation. The same applies 
for interdomain GMPLS.

To quote RFC 4655 (section 4.9.1), about the scalability of GMPLS: "[the 
path computation architecture] is not considered to be a solution that 
is applicable to the entire Internet.  That is, the applicability of 
[this architecture] is limited to a set of domains with known 
relationships."

I think this statement applies for all control planes at the moment.

With NDL, we have created a distributed topology database. However, that 
is only part of the scaling problem. Other solutions may include 
abstraction of multiple domains, hierarchy of addressing (such as IP 
addresses). Remember that the number of constraints is a lot larger 
though: topology constraints, technology constraints, scheduling 
constrains, policy constraints, etc. And that's just for network 
resources, ignoring computing and storage resources that a 
meta-scheduler needs to take into account.

I think this is a worthwhile research topic, and the timing is right. It 
has been shown that multi-domain control planes are possible. Now is the 
time to investigate if this can scale up to 1000s of domains.

Regards,
Freek Dijkstra