Kick-off Message

[Kristin Rauschenbach]

Welcome to the Substrate Working Group from your co-chairs, Joe Evans and Kristin Rauschenbach.  Joe is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Kansas.  He participated in the GENI planning group on wireless technology, and has a long history developing large-scale network research testbeds.  Kristin is Director of Optical Network Technology at BBN Technology and the Substrate Architect for GENI GPO.  Kristin is an interim co-chair and comes from experience building optical network testbeds and commercial optical network systems.

The objective of the Substrate Working Group is to determine what technologies should be in GENI, how they will be used, and the framework for evolution of these substrate technologies in GENI.  The initial deliverable is a description of what can and should be implemented within the next year.  The description will be in the form of an overview of the substrate, and a document for each substrate type.  This documentation will include high-level functional architectures, initial capabilities definitions, projected development schedules with dependencies and identified risks, technology readiness evaluations, and cost estimates.  You can find out more about the working group charter at <http://www.geni.net/wg>. 

Each working group has a GPO system engineer (WGSE) assigned to support the group. The WG SE will share leadership of the working group with the chairs, helping to ensure the WG achieves its goals and effective communication of project office needs to the working group and working recommendations to the project office.  John Jacob from the GPO is the substrate WGSE.  John is an accomplished network designer, with a background in specifying, building and operating national commercial backbones, as well as history of optical network research. A main job of the system engineer is to document the activities of the working group in a coherent and constructive way.  Please be responsive to John’s requests for information from you.  Timely responses will help ensure essential GENI design documentation is ready to meet the needs of the NSF MREFC facility design process.

An important upcoming event is the GPO Engineering Conference, October 9-11 (see <http://www.geni.net/).  We strongly encourage attendance at this important event, where the plans for the next phase of GENI design and prototyping will be presented, and the working groups will be introduced and begin work.

The majority of the substrate working group design activity will take place using email and web tools.  We will create a Wiki collaboration page, and the substrate working group mailing list serves as an archived record of our technical exchanges.

We recognize that the GENI substrate is multi-faceted, and includes a vast array of physical layer, network layer, and computational resources.   One of the co-chairs' early priorities is to identify common GENI issues across this diverse set of technologies in order to ensure a cohesive design methodology for the GENI substrate.  In the future, as we drill down and work with issues specific to different technology aspects, this will provide a common set of approaches and principles on which to base our design choices and guide our design methodology.  In this process we will be guided by two important GENI design principles:  spiral design and federation.  These concepts will be further elucidated during the GENI Engineering Conference, and are introduced in <http://www.geni.net/docs/two_tales_geni_8807_download.pdf>.  We appreciate your direction and suggestions in furthering this important task.   

Joe Evans and Kristin Rauschenbach
Co-Chairs, GENI Substrate Working Group

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