SURA IT Initiatives & Strategy: Infrastructure Initiatives: Atlantic Wave

Atlantic Wave – an International Peering Collaborative

AtlanticWave (A-Wave) represents a distributed exchange and peering fabric along the Atlantic coast of North and South America to facilitate exchange and peering services for the national and international networks that interconnect at international exchange and peering points at MANLAN in NYC, MAX in Washington DC, AMPATH in Miami, and the Sao Paulo Open Exchange (operated by the Academic Network of Sao Paulo - ANSP). The A-Wave service on the East Coast will also link to the PacificWave (P-Wave) service, led by CENIC and the PNWGP, which links the international peering points in LA, Seattle and Chicago. Options for trans-continental connectivity between the key international connections points include Abilene , NLR, and CANARIE in North America , and RedCLARA in South America .

FIU and CENIC, with support from SURA, described the concept and a commitment to the implementation of the A-Wave in their successful proposal to the NSF IRNC program. In particular, the FIU-CENIC led proposal describes the importance of establishing a 10G wave service between Miami, Washington DC, and New York, and having it interconnect with the NSF-funded link from Miami to Sao Paulo to enable a hybrid of scheduled temporary use and permanent use network services to support discipline-specific and general-purpose high performance computing and networking services between North and South America and Europe.

The map below shows the AtlanticWave as the dotted red segment between Miami and NYC. The AtlanticWave interconnects with the solid red segment that is already in service between MANLAN, StarLight and PacificWave; it also interconnects with the red segment from Miami to Sao Paulo .

The current A-Wave stakeholders consist of SURA, the Internet Educational Equal Access Foundation (IEEAF), MANLAN, Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (MAX), Southern Crossroads (SoX)/Southern Light Rail (SLR), Florida Lambda Rail (FLR), AMPATH, the Academic Network of Sao Paulo (ANSP). The planned points of interconnection for the AtlanticWave are NYC/MANLAN, DC/MAX, SoX, AMPATH and ANSP/Sao Paulo, creating an open distributed exchange spanning the Atlantic Rim from NYC to Sao Paulo.

Project Governance

A Governance Committee and an Engineering Committee provide project governance. The Governance Committee is comprised of a representative from each of the key stakeholders. The primary responsibility of the Governance Committee is to collectively make decisions about the A-Wave and to provide coordination with StarLight/TransLight, the P-Wave and other exchange-peering providers. The Governance Committee will establish policy on the usage of A-Wave for production and experimental usage.

Project Engineering Design