Network Operations and Internet Security Lab

Purpose

Cloud-based hosting platforms make computational resources a basic utility that can be expanded and contracted as needed.  However, some distributed services need more than just computing and bandwidth resources - they need control over the network, particularly over the wide-area routes to and from their users.  More flexible route control helps improve performance and reduce operating costs.  For example, interactive applications like online gaming want to select low-latency
paths to users, even if cheaper or higher-bandwidth paths are available. As another example, a service replicated in multiple locations may want to use IP anycast to receive traffic from clients and adjust where the address block is announced in response to server failures or shifts in load. Transit Portal is a platform that provides such wide-area route control to a diverse set of users.

Users

The current deployment of Transit Portal provides researchers and educators with wide-area route control using standardised Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). The TP connects such users transparently to the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and allows them to excercise route control.

• The TP for researchers. Researchers can connect to multiple ISPs in different geographic locations and perform BGP route observations and/or route control and measurements. The TP has Internet numbered resources, such as AS number and IP address blocks, that can be shared among multiple experiments.
• The TP for educators. Educators can use the TP infrastructure in teaching students the Internet routing architecture. The students can obtain access to live BGP sessions to multiple ISPs and perform route control exercises.

# Client side configuration for OpenVPN server.
client
dev tun
proto tcp
remote 143.215.254.26 5000
nobind
persist-key
persist-tun
ca tp-ca.crt
cert client.crt
key client.key