14 GÉANT and GN2 Projects

Since 1996, the CESNET Association has been actively cooperating in building a European infrastructure interconnecting the national research and education networks (NREN) of individual European countries via high-speed links. Year 2004 was no exception. The Association's involvement in these activities became much more intense because of the forthcoming completion of the GÉANT project and especially because of the preparation of a new international project, GN2.

14.1 GÉANT Project

The objective of the GÉANT project, supported by the European Commission within the 5th EU Framework Programme, was to design, develop and operate a Europe-wide infrastructure among individual NRENs during 2000-2004 which would meet at least the following requirements:

enable users to transfer large data volumes in short times
create an environment for advanced networking applications, such as computational grids
ensure interconnection with similarly oriented networks within the global scope

The result of the four-year effort of a consortium comprising 27 NREN operators led by the DANTE Ltd. acting as a project coordinator, is the GÉANT network. The topology of this network as of October 2004, when the GÉANT was completed, is illustrated in the Figure.

Figure 14.1: GÉANT Network Topology, October 2004

The GÉANT network is currently interconnecting 34 European countries. The core of the network (one of its nodes is located within the premises of the CESNET Association in Prague) comprises circuits with a capacity of 10 Gbps. Nodes outside this network core are usually interconnected using circuits with a capacity of 2.5 Gbps. The GÉANT network is also interconnected with North-American networks (Abilene, ESnet, and CANARIE) and the Japanese NREN (SINET). Within joint projects, additional connections to GÉANT have been established to the Latin America (the ALICE project) and to the Southern Mediterranean area (EUMEDCONNECT project).

The active participation of the CESNET Association in the GÉANT network topology planning allowed the Czech Republic to connect directly to the network core. Even better, the node is located directly in premises of the CESNET Association in Prague; this considerably increases the reliability of our connection to the GÉANT network and lowers the costs of this connection. CESNET experts have been actively participating in several research tasks within the TF-NGN workgroups (Task Force - Next Generation Network) where they can exercise their experience - mainly from the area of developing tools for large networks monitoring and traffic analysis, developing tools for monitoring network performance characteristics and implemenenting the IPv6 and multicast.

More detailed information is available on the project website.

14.2 The GN2 Project

Continuity of developing the European research and education infrastructure is ensured through the implementation of a new four-year project within the 6th EU Framework Programme named the Multi-Gigabit European Academic Network which may be better known among the public by its acronym, GN2. The project was officially launched on September 1, 2004 with the objective of constructing an advanced, high-performance infrastructure (GÉANT2), allowing users to access their resources (in terms of information resources, computing capacities, etc.) in real-time from anywhere within the so-called European Research Area (ERA). Great emphasis is put on supporting services which ensure guaranteed connectivity among terminal devices (End to End Performance), resolving mobility-related issues as well as overcoming the "Digital Divide" (the disparity between developments in different countries and regions).

32 organizations dealing with the issues of research and educational high speed networks are involved in the project. The leadership of this also belongs to the DANTE Ltd. The total planned project budget amounts to approx. 180 million Euro, while a contribution from the EU amounting to 93 million Euro is planned.

The topic of high-speed data communication in the research and education environment is conceived very comprehensively within this project. Next to activities related to the development and operation of a given infrastructure, or research in the area of information and communication technologies, great attention is paid to the end-user support and support of developments within particular NRENs. The aim of these activities, encompassing not only technical but also organizational and economical aspects of implementing the state-of-the-art information and communication technologies, is mainly to wipe away existing differences between the technical levels of individual NRENs, thus preparing to build a homogeneous environment for scientific information exchange.

From the network topology and parameters perspective, the GÉANT2 network will be a follow-up to the existing GÉANT network topology, with network core line capacities of 40 Gbps. This network, the operation of which will start during 2005, will support not only basic IP connectivity (via both the IPv4 and IPv6 protocols) including multicast support but also creation of temporary single-purpose infrastructures (grids) or point-to-point connections, based either on VPNs or on providing reserved wavelengths (lambda services).

Unlike the GÉANT project, the GN2 involves also many research activities. These are of a great importance since the overall success of the project depends on results achieved, as the project ambitions are high. The activities are as follows:

14.2.1 JRA1 - Performance Measurement and Control

The goal of this activity is to design and implement an inter-domain performance monitoring system. This system will conduct regular and on-demand measurements of performance characteristics, such as available bandwidth, delay, or packet loss rate for the GÉANT2 network and connected NRENs. The system will be implemented as an extensible set of communicating services (e.g., measurement point service, archive service) using a combination of active monitoring, passive monitoring and processing information obtained from network infrastructure.

CESNET is responsible for specifying requirements for this monitoring system and for passive monitoring. In cooperation with other partners we analysed a set of questionnaires to obtain information about the current state of monitoring in NRENs and about monitoring requirements of NRENs, research projects and users. For passive monitoring, we started work on integrating the SCAMPI passive monitoring platform with the emerging JRA1 infrastructure.

14.2.2 JRA2 - Security

The JRA2 activity deals both with security policies and network monitoring tools. Its activities are closely related to the TERENA CSIRT task force.

In the policy area, the main goal is to deepen the cooperation among the GN2 partners in all areas of network security and to coordinate their actions during security incidents and attacks. In particular, this activity is expected to deliver a consistent security policy for the GÉANT2 core in cooperation with DANTE. However, the activity will by no means limit its focus to backbone networks. It aims to mediate exchange of experiences in fighting all types of security threats, even if they are more of concern to campus and department networks.

CESNET involvement in the international security policy community was so far only marginal. This status was felt inacceptable though, and so a specialised CESNET CSIRT team was established in 2004. This team already started the process of becoming a "listed" member of TF-CSIRT. We expect the group to join GN2/JRA2 activities in 2005.

On the side of network security monitoring tool, JRA2 will identify, test and further develop a set of various monitoring tools. For the most part, this toolset will consist of open source software programs, some of them developed previously by the GN2 partners. CESNET will contribute to the toolset by developing hardware-accelerated network monitoring devices. The short-term target is an autonomous probe generating NetFlow version 9 records (see Section for details). Later, the hardware development will continue with a more general packet payload scanner that will be able to recognise incoming worms, viruses etc. by their "signatures" (unique sequences of bytes). Both the NetFlow probe and payload scanner will be based on the existing COMBO family of cards and will fully utilise the flexibility of the FPGA technology, namely, the ability to reload the firmware on the fly.

14.2.3 JRA3 - New Services Development

The aim of this activity is to prepare conditions for providing dedicated switched connections, especially so-called lambda services. Technologies for automated establishment and control of optical connections based on user requests will be sought, designed and tested. Within this activity, we will take part mainly in defining requirements and selecting suitable technologies for the type of services mentioned above.

14.2.4 JRA4 - Service and Technology Testing

This activity focuses on designing and implementing a testing infrastructure for new transmission technologies and network applications. The testing infrastructure will be formed by combining national testing infrastructures comprising dark fibres that will be fitted with necessary equipment, depending on the experiment type. CESNET experts participate in designing a suitable testing infrastructure topology and in selecting experiments within the area of optical transfer technologies.

14.2.5 JRA5 - Mobility and Roaming

The goal of this activity is to provide users with transparent and simple access to network resources from anywhere. This task requires the roaming issues to be resolved, including the development of unified authentication and authorization infrastructure. Representatives of the CESNET Association contribute to this activity by dealing with the roaming issues within the eduRoam initiative, taking part also in the definition of policies for the shared authentication and authorization infrastructure.

14.2.6 Other CESNET involvement

In addition to the research activities mentioned above, the CESNET Association is involved also in the SA3 activity. This "Service Activity" is concerned with the End-to-End Quality of Service to enable end users to exchange data with guaranteed transfer parameters through the GÉANT2 network. The first task of the CESNET Association within this activity is to design and establish a distributed PERT (Performance Enhancement Response Team) that will handle user problems related to network performance characteristics. The second task is to implement a monitoring system for the GÉANT2 network.

The Europe-wide prestige of CESNET in the framework of R&D activites related to NREN development and operation has been confirmed by electing the managing director of CESNET, Jan Gruntorád, to the five-member executive committee managing the work on the GN2. Achievements of the CESNET Association in the optical network development field have been rewarded also by electing Stanislav ©íma into a closed group of experts responsible for the GÉANT2 network topology design and for selecting suitable optical lines and transfer technologies.

More detailed information is available on the official project website.

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