Overview
The Breakable Experimental Network (BEN) is the primary platform for RENCI network research. BEN is a dark fiber research facilitycreated for researchers and scientists at the three Triangle area universities and in order to promote scientific discovery by providing world-class infrastructure and resources. RENCI engagement sites at UNC-Chapel Hill, NC State and Duke as well as RENCI’s anchor site at Europa Center in Chapel Hill are home to BEN PoPs (Points of Presence) that form a research test bed, which is used by university researchers on a time-sharing basis. RENCI manages the BEN infrastructure on behalf of the three universities. Teams of researchers can install their equipment at BEN PoPs to perform at-scale experiments with disruptive networking technologies.
Overview
The Breakable Experimental Network (BEN) is the primary platform for RENCI network research. BEN is a dark fiber research facilitycreated for researchers and scientists at the three Triangle area universities and in order to promote scientific discovery by providing world-class infrastructure and resources. RENCI engagement sites at UNC-Chapel Hill, NC State and Duke as well as RENCI’s anchor site at Europa Center in Chapel Hill are home to BEN PoPs (Points of Presence) that form a research test bed, which is used by university researchers on a time-sharing basis. RENCI manages the BEN infrastructure on behalf of the three universities. Teams of researchers can install their equipment at BEN PoPs to perform at-scale experiments with disruptive networking technologies.
Details
BEN consists of two planes: the management plane, which runs over a mesh of secure tunnels provisioned over commodity IP; and the data plane, which runs over the dark fiber infrastructure. The management plane allows out-of-band access to control experimental equipment deployed at BEN PoPs. Access to the management plane is granted over a secure VPN.
Each BEN PoP shares the same network architecture that enables the following capabilities in support of regional network research:
- The power and space requirements needed for equipment used by research teams to perform experiments on BEN.
- A reconfigurable fiber switch (layer 0), which provides researchers access to dark fiber for dynamically enabling the creation of different physical experiments and allows experimental equipment to connect to the BEN fiber in a time-shared fashion.
- RENCI additionally provides its own equipment to support collaborative research efforts:
- Infinera DTN Reconfigurable DWDM (Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing) platform, which provides up to 100 Gbp/s bandwidth between PoPs.
- Reconfigurable switch/routers from Cisco and Juniper (layers 2 and 3), which provides packet services.
- Programmable compute platforms (3-4 server blades at each PoP).
