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Calls & Context
GÉANT
Abstract
GÉANT is providing a very high performance, advanced, pan-European networking service interconnecting services provided by Europe's National Research and Education Networks. It supports the development activities of the European Research and Education community. New and advanced applications are being developed to exploit the network capabilities.
Objectives
The primary objective of GÉANT is the creation of a multi Gigabit pan-European network to interconnect National Research and Education Networks. The initial aim of having a network based on DWDM has already been achieved and the GÉANT network became operational on the 1 December 2001. It is the intention to build on this platform both by expanding the platform performance itself, moving to transmission and access capacity in the range of tens of Gbps, and to extend the geography of the network by improving its global connectivity, with the objective of expanding connections between Europe and other world regions. In addition GÉANT will initiate a set of service developments that will provide Quality of Service, Virtual Private Networking, Multicast and Network Security. These technical developments will be based on experience gained in the previous TEN-155 project.
Technical Approach
The technical approach is to procure advanced transmission and routing components via competitive tender and to integrate them to create an advanced network. Having done this, a programme of development will be carried out using the infrastructure.
Europe has an active presence in the development and testing of Internet technologies. This is particularly the case in the area of Quality of Service. It is also true for developments such as IPv6 and multicast. The management of QoS, across differing technologies and multiple management domains, is a serious challenge. In the global internet community, much work is also in progress on the investigation and development of technologies (for example, MPLS and diffserv) to support QoS features in IP networks, multicast developments, trials of IP over DWDM, and the management of end-end QoS across different technologies and management domains.
IP Quality of Service is an area of intense development activity in which many NRENs are directly involved. Much of the work is concentrated on mechanisms which will support various form of differential QoS for different sets of users; much more work needs to be done, for example on management facilities such as bandwidth brokers, before the new technologies can be deployed effectively across an operational network.
Results
GÉANT has already created the most advanced international networking infrastructure in the world. It is expected that the service portfolio offered by this network will be expanded from a basic IP service to encompass Quality of Service offerings as well as support for groups of users and service developments, such as Multicast and IPv6.
In the past, each succeeding generation of European research networking has included more European countries than its predecessor. GÉANT continues this trend. In addition to the countries already connected to TEN-155, GÉANT is providing service to a number of Accession States as defined by the European Commission, including Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and the Slovak Republic. Malta has also applied to become a partner in GÉANT following the signature of the association agreement on the 5th Framework Programme of the European Community for research, technical development and demonstration activities. In total, the GÉANT backbone interconnects on its first day more than 3,000 research and education institutions in 32 countries through 28 national and regional research and education networks. Research co-operation is becoming an increasingly global activity and the requirement for interconnection with other world regions is constantly expanding. An important element of GÉANT is the development of connectivity with equivalent Research Networking in other world regions. Connectivity is being consolidated with the existing equivalents of GÉANT in North America (Abilene, CA*net) and in Asia-Pacific (SINET, KOREN, SingAREN) and developed further between Europe and the Asia-Pacific, North American, South American and Mediterranean regions. Indeed, a total of two circuits of 2.5 Gbps each dedicated to research and education purposes has been implemented in the beginning of 2002 in co-operation with North American Research Networking. International connectivity in GÉANT is achieved through a European Distributed Access, which provides a number of access points for connection with other world regions.
Innovation
The main innovative elements of the project are to acquire and integrate the most advanced transmission systems and routing equipment to create a network whose performance will break new ground. Having achieved this it is intended to implement innovative service developments, as well as improvements to the management and operations of the network and to continue such innovation for the life of the project.
- Project name:
- GÉANT
- Contract no:
- IST-2000-26417
- Project type:
- RTD
- Start date:
- 1 November 2000
- Duration:
- 48 months
- Total budget:
- €200,000,000
- Funding from the EC:
- €80,000,000
- Total effort in person-months:
- 48
- Website:
- http://www.dante.net/geant
- Contact person:
- Mr Dai Davies
- email: dai.davies@dante.org.uk
- tel: +44 1223 302992
- fax: +44 1223 303005
- Project participants:
- ACOne
- ARNES
- BELNET
- CESNET
- CYNET
- DANTE
- DFN
- EENET
- FCCN
- GRNET
- HEAnet
- HUNGARNET
- IMCS LU
- INFN
- IUCC
- KTU
- MCYT
- NORDUnet
- PSNC
- RENATER
- RESTENA
- RoEduNet
- SURFNET
- SWITCH
- UKERNA
- UNIV. MALTA
- Keywords:
- NRENs
- Collaboration with other EC funded projects:
- CÆSAR
- COMREN
- SERENATE