An Implementation of Resource Advertising and Discovery for Optical Research Networks

Abstract

In optical research networks, the need to enable network users to dynamically provision and manage network resources inspired the development of the User Controlled Lightpath Provisioning System (UCLP). The UCLP version 2 (UCLPv2) is based on a service-oriented architecture in which network resources are abstracted as and managed via Web Services. It introduces a new concept, called Articulated Private Network, where end-users collect resources from several different domains to dynamically articulate and change their network topology. In the current UCLPv2 system, the process of resource sharing is manual, usually error prone and inefficient. This thesis proposes, designs and implements a new functionality for resource advertising and discovery as an enhancement to the UCPv2 system. The new functionality describes the UCLPv2 resources based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and advertises them in directories. This allows automation of the resource advertising and discovery. By adopting RDF, the capability of sharing resources with other provisioning applications is achieved.