Fast connection establishment in large-scale networks

In this paper we describe the basic concepts of a signalling procedure for low-delay, on-demand establishment of bandwidth-reserved connections. The procedure is designed to accommodate bandwidth-managed networks of arbitrary size and topology. Standard procedures for the establishment of bandwidth-reserved connections have been proposed which perform path computation and bandwidth reservation based on global topology information as independent tasks in a strictly sequential order. The growing complexity of network nodes (e.g., multi-stage switch fabrics) in large-scale networks may, however, result in severe performance problems in cases of straightforward application of these proposed procedures. Our solution, which is a result of architectural work for the plaNET network being installed as part of the NREN Aurora testbed, is based on a suitable hierarchical structuring of the network nodes that hides node-level details from the global topology and allows the proposal of a connection establishment procedure with a high degree of concurrency between path computation and bandwidth reservation.