• Fall 2003 International Main page
• ITF Meeting: 1st Part (Mon)
• ITF Meeting: 2nd Part (Mon)
• Supporting research in hard to network parts (Tues)
• Global Connectivity: Case Studies (Thur)
• Fall 2003 Member Meeting

Continental Breakfast

Welcome and Opening Remarks
Ana Preston - Internet2 (US) [presentation]

VoIP deployment in the Brazilian national research and education network: experience and future developments
Paulo Henrique Aguiar Rodrigues, RNP (Brasil) [presentation]

We will describe RNP's VoIP pilot experiment, that has been in operation since July 2003, and the planned strategy for launching a scalable IP telephony service in 2004.
We will discuss the H.323 deployed architecture, demonstrating the importance of using IVR (Interactive Voice Response) to minimize PBX configuration and detailing our choice of software. We will describe the active voice measurement environment for collecting voice traffic statistics we have developed based on open H.323 applications and demonstrate the features of our web interface to the collected data. We will show how we have been able to extract the instantaneous and average MOS (mean opinion score) for our voice calls, through the use of extensions to the ITU-T analytical E-model. To provide MOS for user voice calls going through a gateway connected to a PBX, we developed an H.323 sniffer running in parallel with the gateway.
With our tools in place, we are able to show the importance of deploying QoS over the RNP backbone in a very precise quantitative way. The RNP backbone suffers from heavy traffic, with highly congested links, impacting voice calls with high losses, jitter and long RTTs. We will present the call data we collected by monitoring VoIP calls between northeastern Brazil and Rio, during a one week networking event.
We will finally discuss the forthcoming issues, such as our perspectives for integrating QoS and call admission control, extending our environment to support SIP, and experimenting gatekeeper and DNS integration, amongst others.

 

The TWAREN Initiative -- An Update
Fay Sheu, TANet2, National Center for High-performance Computing (Taiwan) [presentation]

TWAREN, the Taiwan Advanced Research and Education Network, is our new entry in research networks based on the 10-Gbps and DWDM technologies. A twin project in grid computing and knowledge discovery serves as the major driver to bring scientific applications on ramp. The new network is a hybrid network, with its 10-Gbps backbone as its production network; whereas its optical segments for research and as lambda (?) testbeds. Its four core nodes, all but one are in science parks in north, central and southern Taiwan. They are connected with 10 G POS and 1550nm extra-long wavelength, when fiber is present. Links from a core node to its regional networks are in 10 GbE and 1310 nm wavelength for fibers. There are eleven regional networks all throughout the island. Institutions of higher education and research as well as pockets of research centers in the science parks will thus be served. Except for one node, each core has aggregates of greater than 40 Gbps and fibers. Dual circuits from two vendors form the physical backbone to guard against failures. The acquisition of equipment was completed in August, 2003. The network is expected to be completed at the end of the year. Migration of TANet2 to the new network will soon begin when TWAREN is up. New services in IPv6, multicast, MPLS and VOIP will be provided.

 

 

Undersea Telecommunication Bandwidth, Global Crossing and where we are headed
Madan Shastrik, Global Crossing [presentation]

An update on the work of the JANET Wireless Advisory Group and Terena Mobility Taskforce
James Sankar, UKERNA (United Kingdom) [presentation]

The presentation will focus on two technical groups that are working on network access issues. These groups are the JANET Wireless Advisory Group and the Terena Mobility Taskforce . Both groups have been established this year, the former is focused on the UK and has a remit to examine a variety of wireless networking issues, whilst the latter the latter is focused on wireless and wired access for nomadic users both within the national networks and inter-networks roaming within Europe. Both groups share a similar goal to develop location independent networks to support nomadic users. The presentation will end with a message to encourage similar activities and participation within and with the Internet2 community.

The JANET Wireless Advisory Group
UKERNA has recognised the need to develop network access solutions to widen access options to JANET. UKERNA conducted a wireless network survey with assistance from the University of Southampton. The survey took place in November 2002 and focused on both fixed and mobile wireless networks in the UK academic community. The key results of this survey will be presented.
The terms of reference and work to date will be presented.

Terena Mobility Taskforce:
The Terena Mobility Taskforce was established in January 2003 and comprises of National European Research and Education Networks (NRENs) that have been working together to scale national network access solutions that accommodate and support guest/nomadic users to ideally, a European wide solution. To date, there has been participation from almost all European Education and Research Networks.

The key requirements and the current national solutions will be presented and there will be an update on the current work to develop a European architecture to support these national solutions. The section will end with details of the group's current plans. The speaker will conclude by encouraging Internet2 and its cademic members and other National Education and Research Networks to participate in the work of the TF Mobility Taskforce by developing national and possibly international solutions and links with the Taskforce to widen the scope of the European "nomadic" network so that benefits can be shared by all.

BREAK

Strategy for research networking in Europe - conclusions and follow-up
Karel Vietsch, TERENA (Europe) [presentation]

SERENATE is the name of a series of strategic studies into the future development of research and education networking in Europe. The studies have investigated the strategic aspects of the development of "superfast" networks at the local, national, European and intercontinental level, looking into the technical, organisational and financial aspects, the market conditions and the regulatory environment. Also various geographic aspects and the extension of the use of research networks to other user communities have been studied. The studies started in May 2002 and have been completed recently. The definitive results and recommendations are currently been written down in the final SERENATE reports, which will be published before the end of 2003. The presentation will discuss the most important of these results and recommendations, as well as possible scenarios for the further development of research networking in Europe. Various follow-up activities will be mentioned

Video Conference Service Development in China During SARS
Congxiao Bao, Xing Li, CERNET (China) [presentation]

People are not encouraged to travel elsewhere to avoid intersectional infected due to the outbreak and spread SARS in the past months in China. To continue academic and management operating, large-scale nation-wide videoconference systems have been developed on CERNET. This paper will introduce the videoconference systems and our experiences.
CERNET is the nation-wide academic Internet backbone connecting 36 Pops in China. There are more than 1,000 universities connected and about 12M users are using CERNET everyday. CERNET is the only network directly connected to Internet2 in China. CERNET is now providing two types of videoconference services based on IP unicast and native multicast.
The videoconference system is using Access Grid compatible software on the 36+ national and regional Pops supported by CERNET native multicast backbone. In order to reach the unicast only campus network, distributed reflectors are implemented. We have been running everyday-report-meeting to check the SARS situation and the NOC staff health condition. The professors and researchers are also using our video conference system to report the SARS related research outcomes to the Minister of Education and the Minster of Science and Technology. The largest videoconference system running at CERNET consists of 100+ active video sources. The H.323 based videoconference system has also been heavily used, mainly for the international conferences (APRU 2003, etc), international seminars and training.
Establishing large-scale videoconference system is a big challenge. This paper will present the experiences we learnt in the very moment of SARS. The future videoconference service architecture will also be discussed.

EU-funded programs for international connectivity
Dai Davies, DANTE (Europe)
[EUMEDCONNECT presentation]
[ALICE presentation]

CLARA - Cooperacion Latino Americana de Redes Avanzadas: milestones, plans and the future
Michael Stanton, RNP (Brasil) [presentation]

Adjourn