A proposed architecture for the GENI backbone platform

The GENI Project (global environment for network innovation) is a major NSF-sponsored initiative that seeks to create a national research facility to enable experimental deployment of innovative new network architectures on a sufficient scale to enable realistic evaluation. One key component of the GENI system will be the GENI backbone platform (GBP) that provides the resources needed to allow multiple experimental networks to co-exist within the shared GENI infrastructure. This paper reviews the objectives for the GBP, the key issues that affect its design and develops a reference architecture that provides a concrete example for how the objectives can be met, using commercially available subsystems.