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On-Demand Secure Circuits and Advance Reservation System

Version 0.5

Introduction

With the advent of service sensitive applications (such as remote- controlled experiments, time constrained massive data transfers, video-conferencing, etc.), it has become apparent that there is a need to augment the services present in today's Energy Sciences Network (ESnet) infrastructure. The On-Demand Secure Circuits and Advance Reservation System (OSCARS) project prototypes one such new service: dynamically provisioned, guaranteed bandwidth secure circuits both within ESnet, and between ESnet and other network domains.

OSCARS is funded out of the DOE Office of Science. The official project page has links to the original proposal, a project summary, and presentations on OSCARS. Based on the original proposal, functional and design specifications were written to formalize the plans for the implementation. The original implementation was based on the Internet2 BRUW project. Since then, the two projects have merged and share a common code base.

A GridNets 2006 paper goes into the details of OSCARS as of August 2006.

A number of developers have contributed to OSCARS, including personnel from ESnet and Internet2.

OSCARS Components

The specifications listed above go into the details of each component of OSCARS. Note that the Pathfinder and Interdomain components listed below were originally part of the BSS component.

Following are notes on each component's usage in practice:

The javadocs cover the programmatic usage of the classes in each component.

Example clients are provided as part of the distribution.

There's a small reservoir of Frequently Asked Questions

Interested users / developers can look at the Technical Overview

We use Subversion for our repository. Usage notes go into merging material from a branch to the trunk, and setting up a domain-specific repository. The domain-specific repository contains material such as properties files and keys, and no code.

OSCARS Dependencies

An effort was made to keep OSCARS's dependencies on other applications to a minimum. The following are notes on the packages we use:

All persistence of reservation and other data is handled using Hibernate. Hibernate is a powerful object-relational mapping system for Java, but has a learning curve. See the usage notes for more details on how we use Hibernate and MySQL.

The server portion of OSCARS currently depends on being deployed under Tomcat 5.5 for the browser-based interface. The API-based interface depends on being deployed under Axis2.1. with rampart 1.1 running under Tomcat 5.5. See configuration notes for Tomcat, Axis2 and OSCARS for details of the configrations we use and Axis2.1 installation notes for how to build and install Axis2.1.1.1 with Rampart1.1. Axis 2.1 is the standard Java SOAP implementation. We use SOAP 1.2 messages for communication, rather than 1.1, because of an incompatibility between Axis2-Rampart1.1 and SOAP fault handling for SOAP 1.1. The client side code generated by Axis2/Rampart does not print out SOAP 1.1 Fault messages. (This has reportably been fixed as of March 2007)

For security reasons, all SOAP messages are signed. To accomplish this, several keystores and configuration files need to be set up.