Bridging the Gap to Next-Generation Internet
Status
This project started in April 2020 and is ongoing.
Researchers
Prof. Dr. Adrian Perrig (ETH)
Dr. Jonghoon Kwon (ETH)
Dr. Felix Kottmann (ETH)
Jelte van Bommel (ETH)
Elham Ehsani Moghadam (ETH)
François Wirz (ETH)
Kyveli Mavromati (Anapaya Systems)
Prof. Dr. Cong Wang (CityUHK)
Xiaohua Jia (CityUHK)
Klaas Wierenga (GÉANT)
Jerry Sobieski (GMU)
Prof. Dr. Marco Canini (KAUST)
Dr. Buseung Cho (KISTI)
Chanjin Park (KISTI)
Prof. Dr. Junboem Hur (KU)
Prof. Dr. Heejo Lee (KU)
Prof. Dr. David Hausheer (OVGU)
Marten Gartner (OVGU)
Prof. Dr. Prateek Mittal (Princeton)
Dr. Cyrll Krähenbühl (Princeton)
Dr. Liang Wang (Princeton)
Henry Birge-Lee (Princeton)
Grace Cimaszewski (Princeton)
Simon Peter Green (SingAREN)
Daniel Bertolo (SWTICH)
Prof. Dr. Ronaldo A. Ferreria (UMFS)
Prof. Dr. Yixin Sun (UVA)
Anxiao He (UVA)
Yizhe Zhang (UVA)
Omo Oaiya (WACREN)
Description
Our journey began with a clear ambition: to fundamentally change how the internet connects the world’s academic and research communities. While the SCION Next-Generation Network (NGN) architecture had already been expanding in commercial sectors, its adoption largely relied on SCION-IP-Gateways (SIGs) that translated traffic, leaving applications unaware of the NGN’s capabilities. To truly fuel innovation, we needed to cultivate an ecosystem of native, SCION-aware applications that could harness the architecture’s power to optimize communication across multiple path choices. This necessity crystallized into two core objectives for our project: simplifying native connectivity for applications and enhancing the scalability of SCION deployment specifically within academic institutions. This mission led to the creation of the SCION Education, Research, and Academic (SCIERA) network infrastructure.
The deployment of SCIERA was a multi-year effort that was more a “journey in which we encountered unexpected challenges” than a single, planned rollout. Our strategy focused on establishing a “BGP-free” network to ensure that the security and stability benefits of SCION would not be compromised by the vulnerabilities of the legacy Internet. We successfully constructed a global infrastructure spanning five continents, connecting research and education networks to provide native SCION connectivity to over 250,000 people. The deployment was structured in a three-tier model: Tier-1 providers formed the global backbone, Tier-2 networks (NRENs) offered national connectivity, and Tier-3 institutions became the end-user sites. This approach was critical for scaling, as it allowed us to leverage dedicated Layer-2 links and existing, recycled infrastructure, balancing new protocol implementation with an accessible, low-cost model to encourage widespread participation without requiring institutions to overhaul their entire network.
The real success of SCIERA lies not just in its geographic reach but in the core lessons learned that simplify the NGN for both end-users and developers. We quickly realized the paramount importance of a seamless first impression, prioritizing “instant, out-of-the-box success” to drive adoption. This led to a major innovation: embedding the bootstrapping and path-lookup functionality directly into the SCION application libraries. This design allows applications to self-configure and run SCION-enabled communication without the user even being aware of the underlying architecture—it will “just work”. For developers, we provided a drop-in socket replacement API in common languages, abstracting away the network complexity while exposing powerful path-aware features for optimizing routes based on criteria like latency or bandwidth. Today, the SCIERA network provides tangible benefits by offering rich global connectivity through a multitude of inter-domain paths, proving that a revolution in network protocols can be achieved through an evolution of current systems.
Publications
F. Wirz, M. Gartner, J. van Bommel, E. Ehsani Moghadam, G. H. Cimaszewski, A. He, Y. Zhang, H. Birge-Lee, F. Kottmann, C. Krähenbühl, J. Kwon, K. Mavromati, L. Wang, D. Bertolo, M. Canini, B. Cho, R. A. Ferreira, S. P. Green, D. Hausheer, J. Hur, X. Jia, H. Lee, P. Mittal, O. Oaiya, C. Park, A. Perrig, J. Sobieski, Y. Sun, C. Wang, and K. Wierenga.
Scaling SCIERA: A Journey Through the Deployment of a Next-Generation Network.
In Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM 2025.
[PDF]
In Proceedings of the USENIX Security Symposium 2022.
[PDF] [arXiv]