GMPLS-based service differentiation for scalable QoS support in all-optical Grid applications

In the forthcoming new era of truly distributed computing, industry, businesses, and home users are placing complex and challenging demands on the transport network, now powered by the emerging photonic technologies, about Quality-of-Service (QoS) assurances that are required for new real-time computing and storage service applications geographically distributed worldwide according to the Grid model. There is the need to devise mechanisms for QoS provisioning in IP over WDM networks that must consider the physical characteristics and limitations of the optical domain to ensure the proper treatment of service classes when passing from the electrical switching to the optical domain and back. In addition, these mechanisms should be directly accessible to Grid applications to make them able to request and release network resources as they need. A (G)MPLS-based control plane combined with a wavelength-routed optical network is seen as a very promising approach for the realization of transport infrastructures for the future “photonic empowered” Grid computing paradigm, since it allows native user-controlled bandwidth resources and class-of-service provisioning, that is one of the strongest requirements for truly distributed computing. Considering this, we propose a general framework for providing differentiated services QoS to Grid applications in wavelength-routed photonic networks, built on the strengths of GMPLS for dynamic path selection and wavelength assignment. This framework makes it technically and economically viable to think of a set of computing, storage or combined computing storage nodes coupled through a high-performance optical network as one large computational and storage device.