Experimental validation of a service oriented network architecture applied to global grid computing

The object of this paper is the experimental demonstration that the recently proposed the service oriented automatic switched transport network (SO-ASTN) is an enabling technology to support global grid computing. The SO-ASTN can be considered as an improvement of the ASTN architecture by the addition of an extra functional layer, namely service plane, designed according to the ITU-T intelligent network conceptual model. SO-ASTN architecture provides network awareness to global grid computing applications such that the QoS level of a LAN can be translated to a wide area network (WAN) scenario. An implementation of the service plane is presented highlighting the software architecture and the technology details. In particular it is applied to a testbed that implement a virtual topology request from a grid application.