TY - GEN
T1 - Scaling SCIERA
T2 - ACM SIGCOMM 2025 Conference, SIGCOMM 2025
AU - Wirz, François
AU - Gartner, Marten
AU - van Bommel, Jelte
AU - Moghadam, Elham Ehsani
AU - Cimaszewski, Grace H.
AU - He, Anxiao
AU - Zhang, Yizhe
AU - Birge-Lee, Henry
AU - Kottmann, Felix
AU - Krähenbühl, Cyrill
AU - Kwon, Jonghoon
AU - Mavromati, Kyveli
AU - Wang, Liang
AU - Bertolo, Daniel
AU - Canini, Marco
AU - Cho, Buseung
AU - Ferreira, Ronaldo A.
AU - Green, Simon Peter
AU - Hausheer, David
AU - Hur, Junbeom
AU - Jia, Xiaohua
AU - Lee, Heejo
AU - Mittal, Prateek
AU - Oaiya, Omo
AU - Park, Chanjin
AU - Perrig, Adrian
AU - Sobieski, Jerry
AU - Sun, Yixin
AU - Wang, Cong
AU - Wierenga, Klaas
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2025 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
PY - 2025/8/27
Y1 - 2025/8/27
N2 - The SCION Next-Generation Network (NGN) architecture has expanded steadily since 2017, with today 20+ ISPs offering SCION connectivity. In production, IP-to-SCION-to-IP translation by SCION-IP-Gateways (SIGs) is used, such that applications are unaware of the NGN communication. To accelerate innovation and deployments, our aim is to increase the number of native SCION use cases, where the application is fully SCION-aware and optimizes communication across all path choices offered by the network. We set out to achieve two core objectives: (1) facilitating simple native connectivity for applications, and (2) enhancing the scalability of SCION deployment at academic sites. With these goals in mind, we built the SCION Education, Research, and Academic (SCIERA) network infrastructure. This paper presents key lessons learned from the SCIERA deployment, which we anticipate will offer actionable insights to researchers, network operators, and system builders seeking to overcome practical challenges also for other NGN deployments. We report on establishing native SCION connectivity at research and education institutions that can reach 250,000 people across five continents, without relying on BGP. Our evaluation demonstrates that our core objectives were reached. Today, the SCIERA deployment offers tangible real-world benefits to users by providing rich global connectivity through a multitude of inter-domain paths.
AB - The SCION Next-Generation Network (NGN) architecture has expanded steadily since 2017, with today 20+ ISPs offering SCION connectivity. In production, IP-to-SCION-to-IP translation by SCION-IP-Gateways (SIGs) is used, such that applications are unaware of the NGN communication. To accelerate innovation and deployments, our aim is to increase the number of native SCION use cases, where the application is fully SCION-aware and optimizes communication across all path choices offered by the network. We set out to achieve two core objectives: (1) facilitating simple native connectivity for applications, and (2) enhancing the scalability of SCION deployment at academic sites. With these goals in mind, we built the SCION Education, Research, and Academic (SCIERA) network infrastructure. This paper presents key lessons learned from the SCIERA deployment, which we anticipate will offer actionable insights to researchers, network operators, and system builders seeking to overcome practical challenges also for other NGN deployments. We report on establishing native SCION connectivity at research and education institutions that can reach 250,000 people across five continents, without relying on BGP. Our evaluation demonstrates that our core objectives were reached. Today, the SCIERA deployment offers tangible real-world benefits to users by providing rich global connectivity through a multitude of inter-domain paths.
KW - network architecture
KW - network deployment
KW - NGN
KW - path-aware networking
KW - resilient networking
KW - SCIERA network
KW - SCION
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105016154148
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105016154148#tab=citedBy
U2 - 10.1145/3718958.3750532
DO - 10.1145/3718958.3750532
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:105016154148
T3 - SIGCOMM 2025 - ACM SIGCOMM 2025 Conference
SP - 720
EP - 741
BT - SIGCOMM 2025 - ACM SIGCOMM 2025 Conference
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Y2 - 8 September 2025 through 11 September 2025
ER -