Research and projects

Research in advanced network technologies and applications is very important component of CESNET's mission. We apply the results of own research mainly to develop the national infrastructure for research, innovations and education. But some of CESNET-invented devices are available on the market as licensed products.

The most important platforms for our research are big national projects. We are involved in two mutually complementing projects today:

Both project aim to develop an excellent-quality service-rich e-infrastructure for the research and development community of the Czech Republic.

Research activities

Because the area covered by research plan is really wide, we decided to split our efforts to following particular research activites:

International projects

We gained significant international credit thanks to our results in the area of advanced networking technologies and applications. We participate in a number of international projects:

GN3—Multi-Gigabit European Academic Network: The goal of the GN3 project is to develop next-generation European backbone infrastructure fulfilling the needs of scientists, researchers and educators. Main focus is given to ad hoc infrastructures (grids) built for the purposes of particular applications, to the user mobility in so cold European Research Area (ERA), and to support dedicated high-quality end-to-end interconnections.
EGI InSPIRE—Integrated Sustainable Pan-European Infrastructure for Researchers in Europe: The EGI InSPIRE project aims to further develop the pan-European grid infrastructure built by the EGEE project series. Its partner are the National Grid Initiatives from nearly all European countries. The project boosts the performance of grid infrastructure and provides support for users and applications. Research activities (which are suppressed in this project) deal with the development of tools simplifying the usage of grid infrastructure.
EMI—European Middleware Initiative: This is another project building on the results of EGEE. It develops the middleware components for EGI grid and similar distributed computational infrastructures. First phase of the project integrates existing components and solves interoperability of them. Consequently, it is expected to replace them by new components with enhanced functionality.
CHAIN—Co-ordination & Harmonisation of Advanced e-INfrastructures: The goal of this project is to interconnect EGI grid with grid infrastructures in Asia, Latin America and Africa. EU supported (or supports yet) particular projects in above-mentioned regions to establish EGI-compatible infrastructures. CHAIN strives to integrate them closer and to enable real global cooperation of scientific teams.
GLIF: The Global Lambda Integrated Facility is an international virtual organization that promotes the paradigm of lambda networking. GLIF provides lambdas internationally as an integrated facility to support data-intensive scientific research, and supports middleware development for lambda networking.
PlanetLab: PlanetLab is a global research network that supports the development of new network services. It is used to develop new technologies for distributed storage, network mapping, peer-to-peer systems, distributed hash tables, and query processing.
VINI: Virtual Network Infrastructure (VINI) is a virtual network infrastructure that allows network researchers to evaluate their protocols and services in the wide area. VINI allows researchers to deploy and evaluate their ideas with real routing software, traffic loads, and network events. To provide flexibility in designing various experiments, VINI supports simultaneous experiments with arbitrary network topologies on a shared physical infrastructure.
OSIRIS—Towards an Open and Sustainable ICT Research Infrastructure Strategy: The OSIRIS project is a platform for the coordination of research initiatives development in the ICT field. It strives to collaborate efficiently by creation of international European ICT infrastructures.