Scaling SCIERA: A Journey Through the Deployment of a Next-generation Network

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.