Problem
Wide-area connectivity is either public Internet transit, with paths chosen by BGP, or leased lines on long contracts.
How it works
Access and path reservations on a SCION backbone
Approach
A SCION backbone where hosts buy access on demand and reserve bandwidth on the paths they select.
Current status
Base SCION connectivity is being established, with the marketplace and path reservations coming soon.
Sites
Initial deployment
North America
- Los Angeles
- Ashburn
Europe
- London
- Amsterdam
- Roubaix
- Zurich
Asia
- Singapore
- Hong Kong
Planned
- Frankfurt
- Šiauliai
Timeline
- NowBase SCION connectivity, starting with Singapore, Ashburn, Roubaix and London.
- NextMarketplace access and Hummingbird path reservations.
My role
I am responsible for the backbone deployment. The marketplace and Hummingbird are parallel research projects.
Backbone deployment
- Region selection, based on large-scale experiments that determined the sites for this deployment
- Work with the carriers, including provisioning the required resources
- Anapaya EDGE routers on bare-metal servers, virtualized with Proxmox
- Peering between our EDGE routers and the carriers
- ISD and AS numbers, and Anapaya licenses
Parallel projects
- Marketplace (ongoing)Hosts buy access to the backbone at a site, for a set duration and bandwidth. I plan to contribute once the deployment is complete.
- Hummingbird (concluded)Inter-domain bandwidth reservations, per hop and atomic across a path. Paper (ACM SIGCOMM 2025)
More research
ACM CoNEXT 2026
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Per-access authorization for IoT sensors and actuators, enforced on the device.
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