Experiments with the Phoebus Session Layer and a Monitoring Framework on GENI

This whitepaper outlines an experimental network architecture that we propose to implement and deploy on resources made available by the emerging GENI infrastructure [7]. Our approach touches on the areas of network middleware, session layer protocol design, and intelligent data movement over heterogeneous networks with the overall goal of improving network throughput for participating systems. In addition, the proposed architecture introduces the concept of intelligent, network-aware services. These services make decisions based on the current network status as observed by a pervasive network monitoring infrastructure. Our goal is to evaluate the performance of a number of novel architectures on the existing GENI substrates, specifically Phoebus and its associated session-layer protocol XSP, and investigate the integration with GENI’s I&M systems, as exemplified by the LAMP Project perfSONAR-based GENI I&M system [3, 8, 9].