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

François Wirz; Marten Gartner; Jelte van Bommel; Elham Ehsani Moghadam; Grace H. Cimaszewski; Anxiao He; Yizhe Zhang; Henry Birge-Lee; Felix Kottmann; Cyrill Krähenbühl; Jonghoon Kwon; Kyveli Mavromati; Liang Wang; Daniel Bertolo; Marco Canini; Buseung Cho; Ronaldo A. Ferreira; Simon Peter Green; David Hausheer; Junbeom Hur; Xiaohua Jia; Heejo Lee; Prateek Mittal; Omo Oaiya; Chanjin Park; Adrian Perrig; Jerry Sobieski; Yixin Sun; Cong Wang; Klaas Wierenga

doi:10.1145/3718958.3750532

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

François Wirz (Co-first Author)
, Marten Gartner (Co-first Author)
, Jelte van Bommel (Co-first Author)
, Elham Ehsani Moghadam
, Grace H. Cimaszewski
, Anxiao He
, Yizhe Zhang
, Henry Birge-Lee
, Felix Kottmann
, Cyrill Krähenbühl
, Jonghoon Kwon
, Kyveli Mavromati
, Liang Wang
, Daniel Bertolo
, Marco Canini
, Buseung Cho
, Ronaldo A. Ferreira
, Simon Peter Green
, David Hausheer
, Junbeom Hur

Xiaohua Jia, Heejo Lee, Prateek Mittal, Omo Oaiya, Chanjin Park, Adrian Perrig, Jerry Sobieski, Yixin Sun, Cong Wang, Klaas Wierenga

Research output: Chapters, Conference Papers, Creative and Literary Works › RGC 32 - Refereed conference paper (with host publication) › peer-review

4 Citations (Scopus)

4 Downloads (CityUHK Scholars)

Abstract

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.
© 2025 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).

Original language	English
Title of host publication	SIGCOMM '25
Subtitle of host publication	Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGCOMM 2025 Conference
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery
Pages	720-741
Number of pages	22
ISBN (Print)	9798400715242
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1145/3718958.3750532
Publication status	Published - 2025
Event	ACM SIGCOMM 2025 Conference (SIGCOMM 2025) - Coimbra, Portugal Duration: 8 Sept 2025 → 11 Sept 2025

Conference

Conference	ACM SIGCOMM 2025 Conference (SIGCOMM 2025)
Place	Portugal
City	Coimbra
Period	8/09/25 → 11/09/25

Bibliographical note

Full text of this publication does not contain sufficient affiliation information. With consent from the author(s) concerned, the Research Unit(s) information for this record is based on the existing academic department affiliation of the author(s).

Funding

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback, our shepherd Marwan Fayed for his guidance during the revision, and the anonymous participants of our survey for their contributions to this project. This work was partially supported by the Institute of Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation (IITP) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No. RS-2024-00440780, Development of Automated SBOM, VEX Verification Technologies for Securing Software Supply Chains), CAPES Finance Code 01, CNPq Procs. 308101/2022-7, 420934/2023-5, and FAPESP Procs. 2023/00812-7, 2020/05183-0, 2023/00811-0.

Research Keywords

network architecture
network deployment
NGN
path-aware networking
resilient networking
SCIERA network
SCION

Publisher's Copyright Statement

This full text is made available under CC-BY 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Access Output

10.1145/3718958.3750532

376669289.pdfFinal Published version, 1.05 MBLicence: CC BY

Other Access Options

Check CityUHK Library

Permanent Link

Right click to copy link

Cite this

Wirz, F., Gartner, M., van Bommel, J., Moghadam, E. E., Cimaszewski, G. H., He, A., Zhang, Y., Birge-Lee, H., Kottmann, F., Krähenbühl, C., Kwon, J., Mavromati, K., Wang, L., Bertolo, D., Canini, M., Cho, B., Ferreira, R. A., Green, S. P., Hausheer, D., ... Wierenga, K. (2025). Scaling SCIERA: A Journey Through the Deployment of a Next-Generation Network. In SIGCOMM '25: Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGCOMM 2025 Conference (pp. 720-741). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3718958.3750532

@inproceedings{392a9e282a2443518a6e579b7758d942,

title = "Scaling SCIERA: A Journey Through the Deployment of a Next-Generation Network",

abstract = "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. {\textcopyright} 2025 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).",

keywords = "network architecture, network deployment, NGN, path-aware networking, resilient networking, SCIERA network, SCION",

author = "Fran{\c c}ois Wirz and Marten Gartner and \{van Bommel\}, Jelte and Moghadam, \{Elham Ehsani\} and Cimaszewski, \{Grace H.\} and Anxiao He and Yizhe Zhang and Henry Birge-Lee and Felix Kottmann and Cyrill Kr{\"a}henb{\"u}hl and Jonghoon Kwon and Kyveli Mavromati and Liang Wang and Daniel Bertolo and Marco Canini and Buseung Cho and Ferreira, \{Ronaldo A.\} and Green, \{Simon Peter\} and David Hausheer and Junbeom Hur and Xiaohua Jia and Heejo Lee and Prateek Mittal and Omo Oaiya and Chanjin Park and Adrian Perrig and Jerry Sobieski and Yixin Sun and Cong Wang and Klaas Wierenga",

note = "Full text of this publication does not contain sufficient affiliation information. With consent from the author(s) concerned, the Research Unit(s) information for this record is based on the existing academic department affiliation of the author(s).; ACM SIGCOMM 2025 Conference (SIGCOMM 2025) ; Conference date: 08-09-2025 Through 11-09-2025",

year = "2025",

doi = "10.1145/3718958.3750532",

language = "English",

isbn = "9798400715242",

pages = "720--741",

booktitle = "SIGCOMM '25",

publisher = "Association for Computing Machinery",

address = "United States",

}

Wirz, F, Gartner, M, van Bommel, J, Moghadam, EE, Cimaszewski, GH, He, A, Zhang, Y, Birge-Lee, H, Kottmann, F, Krähenbühl, C, Kwon, J, Mavromati, K, Wang, L, Bertolo, D, Canini, M, Cho, B, Ferreira, RA, Green, SP, Hausheer, D, Hur, J, Jia, X, Lee, H, Mittal, P, Oaiya, O, Park, C, Perrig, A, Sobieski, J, Sun, Y, Wang, C & Wierenga, K 2025, Scaling SCIERA: A Journey Through the Deployment of a Next-Generation Network. in SIGCOMM '25: Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGCOMM 2025 Conference. Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 720-741, ACM SIGCOMM 2025 Conference (SIGCOMM 2025), Coimbra, Portugal, 8/09/25. https://doi.org/10.1145/3718958.3750532

Scaling SCIERA: A Journey Through the Deployment of a Next-Generation Network. / Wirz, François (Co-first Author); Gartner, Marten (Co-first Author); van Bommel, Jelte (Co-first Author) et al.
SIGCOMM '25: Proceedings of the 2025 ACM SIGCOMM 2025 Conference. Association for Computing Machinery, 2025. p. 720-741.

Research output: Chapters, Conference Papers, Creative and Literary Works › RGC 32 - Refereed conference paper (with host publication) › peer-review

TY - GEN

T1 - Scaling SCIERA

T2 - ACM SIGCOMM 2025 Conference (SIGCOMM 2025)

AU - Wirz, François

AU - Gartner, Marten

AU - van Bommel, Jelte

AU - Moghadam, Elham Ehsani

AU - Cimaszewski, Grace H.

AU - He, Anxiao

AU - Zhang, Yizhe

AU - Birge-Lee, Henry

AU - Kottmann, Felix

AU - Krähenbühl, Cyrill

AU - Kwon, Jonghoon

AU - Mavromati, Kyveli

AU - Wang, Liang

AU - Bertolo, Daniel

AU - Canini, Marco

AU - Cho, Buseung

AU - Ferreira, Ronaldo A.

AU - Green, Simon Peter

AU - Hausheer, David

AU - Hur, Junbeom

AU - Jia, Xiaohua

AU - Lee, Heejo

AU - Mittal, Prateek

AU - Oaiya, Omo

AU - Park, Chanjin

AU - Perrig, Adrian

AU - Sobieski, Jerry

AU - Sun, Yixin

AU - Wang, Cong

AU - Wierenga, Klaas

N1 - Full text of this publication does not contain sufficient affiliation information. With consent from the author(s) concerned, the Research Unit(s) information for this record is based on the existing academic department affiliation of the author(s).

PY - 2025

Y1 - 2025

N2 - 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. © 2025 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).

AB - 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. © 2025 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).

KW - network architecture

KW - network deployment

KW - NGN

KW - path-aware networking

KW - resilient networking

KW - SCIERA network

KW - SCION

UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105016154148

UR - https://www.scopus.com/record/pubmetrics.uri?eid=2-s2.0-105016154148&origin=recordpage

U2 - 10.1145/3718958.3750532

DO - 10.1145/3718958.3750532

M3 - RGC 32 - Refereed conference paper (with host publication)

SN - 9798400715242

SP - 720

EP - 741

BT - SIGCOMM '25

PB - Association for Computing Machinery

Y2 - 8 September 2025 through 11 September 2025

ER -

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

Abstract

Conference

Bibliographical note

Funding

Research Keywords

Publisher's Copyright Statement

Access Output

Other Access Options

Permanent Link

Other Files and Links

Fingerprint

Cite this