Enhancing ESnet’s Unicast-Only OSCARS with a Manycast Overlay Service

Distributed workflows are becoming the norm in scientific collaborations. Laboratories on opposite sides of the globe often exchange experimental information and transmit independent data to multiple storage or super-computing sites. Often these applications result in petabytes or exabytes of information. Such trends reveal the necessity for intelligent and efficient communication paradigms like multicasting and manycasting, which provide point-to-multipoint transfers. ESnet’s On-Demand Secure Circuits and Advance Reservations System (OSCARS) provides logic and architectural support for directed point-to-point circuit provisioning for unicast communication on large-scale optical backbone core networks. This work aims to provide manycast support as a logical overlay to OSCARS on networks which do not have the appropriate splitting hardware at the optical layer. We implement a novel front-end manycast client that communicates directly with OSCARS. Through simulated traffic scenarios on a realistic topology, the flexibility of manycast over multicast in networks with limited splitting capabilities is demonstrated.