Open Exchange Points (OXPs) serve as meet points for connecting and facilitating the exchange of data between Research and Education (R&E) networks. They are critical cyberinfrastructure in the transit of data over long geographical distances, switching data flows from one R&E network to the next, to its destination. For example, data from the Vera Rubin Observatory will transit 6 OXPs as it moves from the southern to northern hemispheres. Operationalizing the transit of data flows across OXPs is increasingly important to minimize the impact from events on network services (hardware failures and soft failures). End-to-end network paths for these data flows are not under the control of any individual organization. Multiple R&E network operators must coordinate to establish geographically distributed end-to-end paths – an effort that can take days to weeks.Florida International University (FIU), University of Southern California – Information Sciences Institute (USC-ISI) and University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill - RENCI are furthering AtlanticWave-SDX: a distributed experimental SDX, supporting research, experimental deployments, prototyping and interoperability testing, on national and international scales. AtlanticWave-SDX leverages innovations from the initial AtlanticWave-SDX project, introducing new capabilities, enabling OXPs to react to unplanned network events by adding intelligent closed-loop control of network services powered by in-band network telemetry.AWAVE-SDX is comprised of two components: An infrastructure development component with optical super channels to reframe and reprovision network capacity between R&E backbone networks; An innovation component to build a distributed intercontinental experimental SDX by leveraging OXPs in the U.S., Chile, Brazil, and S. Africa.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
