Supporting communities in programmable grid networks: gTBN

This paper presents the generalised Token Based Networking (gTBN) architecture, which enables dynamic binding of communities and their applications to specialised network services. gTBN uses protocol independent tokens to provide decoupling of authorisation from time of usage as well as identification of network traffic. The tokenised traffic allows specialised software components uploaded into network elements to execute services specific to communities. A reference implementation of gTBN over IPv4 is proposed as well as the presentation of our experiments. These experiments include validation tests of our test bed with common grid applications such as GridFTP, OpenMPI, and VLC. In addition, we present a firewalling use case based on gTBN.