Scaling SCIERA: A Journey Through the Deployment of a Next-generation Network
François Wirz, Marten Gartner, Jelte van Bommel, Elham Ehsani Moghaddam, Grace Cimaszewski, Anxiao He, Yizhe Zhang, Henry Birge-Lee, Felix Kottmann, Cyrill Krähenbühl, Jonghoon Kwon, Kyveli Mavromati, Wang Liang, Daniel Bertolo, Marco Canini, Buseung Cho, Ronaldo Alves Ferreira, Simon Peter Green, David Hausheer, Junbeom Hur · 2025
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.