New e-Science and Grid applications require the coordination of geographically distributed scientific instruments along with data and computing resources. Due to the quality of service (QoS) requirements of these applications, these distributed resources can be connected by a wavelength-routed optical network allowing each application to get dedicated bandwidth. These networks are referred to as LambdaGrids. One important service provided in these networks is advance reservation. Applications need to coordinate the use of both grid resources and the network. Advance reservation allows these applications to reserve bandwidth in-advance to guarantee availability. In this article, we discuss different networks and frameworks that support advance reservation of bandwidth. We will discuss the general architecture of each network and the type of advance reservation services supported.

Abstract — The most representative research network in Korea, KREONET, has developed DynamicKL, an advance reservation based network service agent for user driven virtual circuit services. DynamicKL provides reservation, provisioning, release, termination, and inquiry web services for network resources by using an open standard network service interface (NSI), as well as web services for network resources by using a GUI interface. In addition, it has the RESTful web service Interface for Configuration and Event management (RICE) to support a protection management function for virtual circuits and reservations. In this paper, a protection management per virtual circuit (VC) for provisioned VCs and reservations is addressed in the DynamicKL framework, as a contribution to the VC protection management issue, which results in more manageable and reliable VC services compared to other advance reservation frameworks. An administrator can detect successful or unsuccessful VC protections in the event of a primary link failure and successful or unsuccessful VC retrievals after a primary link repair, by using RICE.

Traditionally, research on routing and wavelength assignment over wavelength-routed WDM networks is concerned with immediate reservation (IR) demands. An IR demand typically does not specify a holding time for data transmission and the start time of the data transmission is assumed to be immediate (i.e. when the connection request arrives). The concept of advance reservation (AR) has recently been gaining attention for optical networks. An AR demand typically specifies information about the start of the data transmission or a deadline, as well as the holding time of the transmission. AR has several important applications for both wide-area networks and Grid networks. For example, AR can be used for adjusting virtual topologies to adapt to predictable peak hour traffic usage. It can be used to provide high-bandwidth services such as video conferencing and in Grid applications requiring the scheduled distribution of large files and for co-allocation of network and grid resources. AR can also be beneficial to the network by allowing the network operator to better plan resource usage and therefore increase utilization. Knowledge of the holding time can lead to more optimal decisions for resource allocation. This translates to better quality of service for users. In this paper we provide a comprehensive survey of the past and current work on advance reservation for optical networks. There have been many variations of the advance reservation concept proposed, so we will also provide a broad classification. In addition to the survey, we will discuss what we believe are important areas of future work and open challenges for advance reservation on optical networks.

Abstract—As grid applications evolve, the need for user controlled network infrastructure is apparent in order to support emerging dynamic and interactive services. Due to the inherent bandwidth offered by optical wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) networks, they prove to be a potential candidate to support the bandwidth intensive grid applications. In a grid environment, the available resources can be classified into two broad categories: grid resources which consist of computing and storage components that reside on each node of the network and network resources which provide bandwidth for the execution of a grid application. A typical grid application (job) is usually divided into a number of smaller tasks which need to be scheduled, on possibly different nodes of the network in order to ensure job completion. There usually exists some dependency between these tasks and a strict time-deadline within which the job needs to be completed. Rather than using an independent scheduling approach (at the grid and network levels), we address the coscheduling problem in lambda-grids for advance reservation requests and aim at minimizing the job blocking probability. We use the anycasting communication paradigm referred to as co-anycasting, to allocate grid and network resources to all tasks of a job. We propose three heuristics: first free (FF), shortest hop (SH), and least used (LU) to solve the co-scheduling problem. Moreover, we compare the proposed co-anycasting approach to a grid-anycasting approach, wherein the anycasting flexibility is offered only at the grid level, and show through extensive simulations the performance benefit of using co-anycasting to support grid applications in a time-deadline environment.