1 Introduction

This report describes the progress in the Optical National Research Network and its New Applications research plan and particular results achieved in 2005. This was the second year of this seven-year research plan.

Given the broad spectrum of research work and a large number of researchers involved - 29 CESNET staff employees and 137 part-time researchers, mainly coming from the CESNET member institutions (universities and institutes of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic) - we divided the research into twelve thematic activities:

Development of the CESNET2 backbone network
Optical networks
Programmable hardware
Network and traffic monitoring
Performance monitoring and optimisation
AAI and mobility
IP telephony
MetaCentre
Virtual collaborative environments
Support for distance education
CESNET CSIRT
Medical applications

The activities comprise areas from the lowest transmission layers through middleware, authentication, authorisation, security up to applications. Each activity has its head and a deputy head who coordinate their research team and guarantee the professional level and effective utilisation of allocated funds. Twice a year, the results achieved by the activities are internally evaluated in order to identify areas for potential improvements and/or suggest new research directions for the next period. A special attention is paid to making the mutual collaboration and interaction of activities more effective and also to getting user feedback. Our aim it to transform the results of the research activities into production services as soon as possible.

Internal evaluation of the activities and general co-ordination of the work on the research plan is executed by the Managing Council - the advisory body of the principal investigator. In 2005, the Managing Council had the following members:

Ing. Jan Gruntorád, CSc. - CESNET
RNDr. Eva Hladká, Ph.D. - Masaryk University in Brno
Ing. Tomáš Košňar - CESNET
Ing. Ladislav Lhotka, CSc. - CESNET
Doc. RNDr. Luděk Matyska, CSc. - Masaryk University in Brno
Ing. Václav Novák - CESNET
RNDr. Pavel Satrapa, Ph.D. - Technical University of Liberec
Ing. Helmut Sverenyák - CESNET
Ing. Stanislav Šíma, CSc. - CESNET
Dr. Ing. Pavel Šmrha - University of West Bohemia in Plzeň

Management of a large and distributed team of researchers is also rather demanding in terms of technical and administrative support, information and communication systems etc. In this respect, it was certainly not helpful that the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports in May 2005 dramatically changed the structure of the previously allocated budget for 2005. This budgetary change was an extra burden for both the research teams and support staff and implied significant revisions of the activities' plans. In October 2005, after a series of negotiations, the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports issued a new resolution containing an updated budget structure that was already acceptable. As a result, we could arrange our work plans so that all essential results that were planned in 2005 could have been achieved.

Another fact that seriously complicated our work was the existing legislation concerning procurement procedures, which is apparently not suitable for the research area. More than six month are often needed before selected equipment can be purchased. This is hardly acceptable for an effective research in the dynamic area of data communications.

Despite the complications mentioned above, we managed to accomplish the planned deliverables and fulfil the goals as defined in the accepted research plan for 2005. We achieved internationally recognised results in some areas such as the customer empowered fibre networks, utilisation of programmable hardware for implementing hardware-accelerated routing and monitoring devices , multimedia applications, Grid technology and medical applications. These accomplishments suggest that the general direction of the research plan is sound and in line with recent developments in the corresponding areas.

We would like to thank the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports for the important support provided to our research plan and for resolving the imminent funding issues that threatened a successful continuation of the research plan.

The following chapters contain a detailed account on the progress of individual activities and their results. Each chapter was authored or co-authored by different researchers, usually including the head of the corresponding activity. Therefore, this publication may be regarded as a collection of papers with a common theme.

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