ARES: Advanced Networking for Distributing Genomic Data

This paper shows the network and service architecture being implemented within the project ARES (Advanced networking for the EU genomic RESearch). This architecture is designed for both providing delivery of genomic data set over the GÉANT network and supporting the genomic research in EU countries. For this purpose, the strategic objective of the project ARES is to create a novel Content Distribution Network (CDN) architecture, suitable for handling the rapidly increasing diffusion of genomic data. This paper summarizes the status of the project, the ongoing research, and the achieved and expected results. This CDN architecture is based on an evolved NSIS signalling, and addresses the major challenges for managing genomic data sets over a shared wideband network with limited amount of resources made available to the service. Besides a detailed description of the functional entities included in the ARES architecture, we illustrate the signalling protocols that support their interaction, and provide preliminary experimental results obtained by the implementation and deployment of two significant research scenarios within our research laboratories.