2 Summary

The research plan High-speed National Research Network and Its New Applications pursues the following fundamental objectives:

operate a high-speed national research network, CESNET2
ensure its further development, according to the needs of users and current status of the technology
participate in analogous projects at European and global levels
carry out original research in the area of networking technologies and their applications
actively seek, adapt and develop corresponding applications.

The specific aspect of this research plan is that it has, to a great extent, the character of a service. Most of the investments are spent on the operation and development of a communication infrastructure for science, research and education. A number of other projects and activities benefit from the project, even if not directly associated with this research plan or CESNET, since an adequate communication infrastructure is often an implicit assumption.

Due to a broad range of the research plan, all activities were divided into thematically defined projects, classified further into three categories: strategic, international and other. The remainder of this chapter includes a brief summary of the activities and results of individual projects. For a more detailed information see the following chapters.

2.1 CESNET2 Backbone and its Services

2.2 Strategic Projects

The main objective of the project Optical networks and their development has been the development of optical technologies and their application in national research networks. In 2003 we essentially finished transition of CESNET2 network to dark fibres. We have also been engaged in the analysis of the possibilities for international dark fiber interconnection. We started building an experimental network named CzechLight, which is dedicated to the research in optical transmission technologies.

We achieved very good results in the domain of fibres with no equipment along the route (Nothing In Line, NIL). We managed to increase the distance reachable by this technology to 235 km (Brno-Ostrava). We increased significantly the number of NIL lines in the CESNET2 network - more than one half of the backbone lines are currently of the NIL type. We simulated long-haul data transmissions using 1, 2.5 and 10 Gbps.

Single-fibre equipment is another interesting technology we dealt with. After testing it on an experimental line connecting the National Library to CESNET, we deployed five single-fibre lines with transmission speeds of 100 Mbps. These connections are suitable especially for connecting smaller nodes to the backbone (Cheb, Opava, Karviná, etc.).

Implementation of IPv6 in CESNET2 network has been focusing on the development and deployment of the new version of IP. In 2003 we advanced significantly by removing previously used tunnels and starting a native IPv6 service over MPLS transport (using the so-called 6PE technology). IPv4 and IPv6 protocols are now equal in the backbone. We tried to treat both protocols equally also in access networks, but the delay in shipment of new control engines for access routers hindered our effort. We nevertheless expect to be able to configure our access routers for an IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack operation within first months of 2004. We also established IPv6 peerings with six inland networks.

In October, we organised a successful workshop titled IPv6 - development and deployment. The event met with very positive responses from networking professionals.

The Liberouter project continues the development of a PC-based accelerated IPv6 router. During 2003 we designed and created daughter cards for the COMBO6 motherboard, which implements hardware packet forwarding. Because of the flexibility of the programmable hardware it is based on, several other projects got interested in using it for their special purposes. We advanced significantly with the software development and expect to deliver the first prototype router in 2004.

The project Multimedia transmissions focuses on the transport of multimedia contents over data networks. In collaboration with MU Brno we developed the first AccessGrid network node allowing high-quality videoconferencing and creation of a virtual working environment. Workspace for 3D videoconferencing is included in the AccessGrid node, which also enables research in this field.

Most activities that were started in the previous years continued in 2003 - development of a unicast videoconferencing mirror, building the H.323 infrastructure, support of pilot groups, and collaboration with Czech Radio on high-quality network broadcasts of its programs.

The MetaCentre project has been developing the national grid - a distributed platform for demanding computations. It was upgraded by adding new 64 Intel Pentium IV Xeon 2.4 GHz processors. In addition to this, disk, memory and networking capacities of the existing grid nodes have also been significantly expanded.

We made important changes to the information and authentication services. Along with increasing compatibility with common standards, we reworked the system Perun for managing user accounts so that it is now ready to support large-scale homogeneous grids. We continued testing the behaviour of various task types in a highly distributed computing environment.

The project Voice services in CESNET2 has been working further on our IP telephony platform. Its core is essentially operating in a production mode - 20 association members are connected to our IP telephony network and use it rather heavily. The overall traffic volume increased by a factor of more than six compared to the end of 2002. We also have several new foreign partners reachable over IP telephony.

In the research area we focused on experiments with advanced features of IP phones and different setups of the infrastructure. We continued our research of the SIP protocol that is supposed to become the successor of H.323.

The End-to-end performance project investigates methods of bandwidth provisioning, throughput monitoring and other related topics. We concentrate in particular on end-host tuning, which can significantly improve the transmission performance. We have also contributed to international initiatives, such as PERT, whose mission is to establish a support body for helping users solve their performance-related problems.

2.3 International Projects

The goal of the GÉANT project has been to create a high-speed backbone connecting the National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) in European countries. In 2003 we took part in the operation and development of this network (including IPv6 deployment), including the workgroups of TF-NGN, which represent the research part of the project. Our contribution was mainly in the fields of optical technologies, quality of service, IPv6, and network monitoring.

In the DataGrid project, which focuses on large-scale grids for processing huge data volumes, we have been responsible for the development of a logging service and security protocols. In 2003 we concentrated on the deployment of version 2 that was started in the previous year. Along with the development of version 2.1 we have also been preparing the forthcoming version 3. We created an interface of the logging service with R-GMS (grid monitoring architecture). However, since we found out that the R-GMS implementation suffers from many flaws, we started the development of our own variant of R-GMS at the end of 2003.

We participated on finalising the proposal for the EGEE (Enabling Grids for E-science and industry in Europe) project, which can be considered a successor to DataGrid. In this project we will continue the development of the grid middleware. We are the only participant from Central Europe who obtained direct financial support. The project proposal was accepted and will start on April 1st, 2004.

The SCAMPI project focuses on high-speed network monitoring. Our participation was originally aimed at equipment evaluation, testing and measurements. However, after one of the SCAMPI partners failed to deliver the promised hardware measurement device, we were invited to fill this gap with the COMBO6 card, namely to adapt it for the purposes of high-speed network monitoring. As a consequence, CESNET increased its person-month capacity in the project and Masaryk University was accepted as an additional project partner.

In the first stage we intend to use the current version of COMBO6 for monitoring using the existing Gigabit Ethernet daughter cards. Later we plan to create a daughter card capable of monitoring 10 Gbps lines - this is the target speed of the SCAMPI project.

Finally, the fourth project of 5th EU Framework Programme with CESNET participation is 6NET. Its goal is to build a large-scale experimental IPv6-only network and gain practical experience with its operation. The primary contribution of CESNET to this project is the development of an IPv6 router based on the COMBO6 card. Apart from that, we also participate in other activities, for example in building and operating the 6NET backbone and in experiments with IPv4/IPv6 coexistence.

2.4 Other Projects

The project Infrastructure and Technologies for On-Line Education, being a pilot project of the Department of Telecommunication Engineering (Czech Technical University in Prague, Faculty of Electrical Engineering), aims at developing and evaluating tools for an electronic support of education (eSupport). In 2003 we finished the WWW portal containing educational materials, live transmissions and recordings of lectures. We have also been preparing lectures to be shared by remote universities.

The project Distributed Call Centre represents an advanced IP telephony application. It integrates many technologies and offers various options for the communication between a user and an operator - from the common phone call to sharing applications and remote guidance. In 2003 we realised some configuration changes and developed scripts for controlling the components of the call centre.

The main result of the Intelligent NetFlow Analyzer project is the distribution version of the NetFlow Monitor program for network traffic evaluation. The program was downloaded by more than 1000 organisations in 60 countries since its release (1st quarter of 2003). During 2003 we have been improving and enhancing the program in many ways - five new versions were released till October.

The project Storage over IP has been testing HyperSCSI - a protocol allowing transport of SCSI commands over the network. We tested its software implementations for Linux and MS Windows operating systems. Especially the Linux implementation was found to be functional and usable for building cheap local storage networks. So far, the only supported protocol is Ethernet, which disables the use of this method in wide area networks.

The Presentation project has been working on a framework for further development of our WWW server. This year we implemented a significant technological upgrade and face-lift by converting the code to the combination of strict XHTML 1.0 and CSS. We released 30 technical reports, two thirds of them being written in English. We also organised two successful workshops - New Ways in Development of High-speed Networks and their Applications, and IPv6 - development and implementation.

Network security is the subject of another project named Security of local CESNET2 networks. The ever increasing number of attacks targeting both commercial and academic networks calls for new countermeasures that sometimes utilise rather unconventional methods. The goal of the project team is thus to mediate information about freely available systems for detecting and preventing intrusions, develop our own extensions and, last but not least, implement these tools in our networks in order to make them more secure.

The objective of the project NTP server controlled by the national time etalon is to provide a time server offering an "official time". We designed and implemented the architecture of the server already in 2002, this year we continued with various tests and improvements (for example, we developed a new version of the control software). The achieved accuracy of 500 ns surpassed our original expectations.

Finally, the project Platforms for video transmission and production focuses on the technologies for video transmission and broadcasting. Beside realising many live broadcasts and enhancing the video archive, we have been engaged in an international collaboration within the TF-Netcast group. Our most important contribution to the activities of this group was an improved announcement portal prenosy.cesnet.cz. In collaboration with the Jyxo company we developed a system for searching metadata of multimedia files. In the second half of 2003 we created the portal streaming.cesnet.cz dedicated fully to multimedia transmissions.

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