Towards user-controlled scheduling of network resources
Nowadays many organizations purchase optical wavelengths or entire strands of optical fiber in order to use their own switching equipment for connecting to each other or to Internet service providers. This trend promotes the development of novel high-performance Grid applications that will empower the end-points (i.e. users or applications) to establish on demand circuit switched light-paths to reduce infrastructure costs. Such user/application-empowered networks ensure optimal Quality of Service by dedicating applications their own guaranteed end-to-end light-paths/wavelengths on demand.
Access control to light-path resources and services, however, is here of utmost importance. To make the access control process efficient over a heterogeneous set of optical network service providers, fragments of user profiles have to be collected, stored and interpreted at different places and by different players. These user profiles, moreover, need to be communicated and matched against each other. Thus, identity and its management are required to effectively deliver access to light-path resources and related control services.

Controlling access to network resources
Lack of trust hinders effective sharing, reservation and utilization of optical network resources in user-controlled light-path establishment across multiple domains. The Telematica Instituut investigates and demonstrates the role of identity management as an integral part of the overall trust establishment mechanisms required for user-controlled end-to-end light-path provisioning. We show how secure DNS can help establishing trust between parties involved in identity management, without any mutual prearrangement. This DNS approach enables the dynamic realization of secured communication channels in order to exchange identity-related information. A trusted third party is required only to manage the DNS domain tree, with entries representing users' organizations and optical network service providers associated with that trusted party. When all trust relationships and secure channels are in place, we show how to apply an identity management solution to trustfully exchange information."

Duration:
January 2006 - December 2006

Project website:
www.gigaport.nl