Optical network: CERNET's experiences and prospective

Abstract

China Education and Research Network (CERNET) is the largest academic Internet backbone in China and one of the largest in the world. This paper will introduce the current CERNET infrastructure as well as the CERNET’s next generation plan. CERNET has more than 20,000KM dark fibers and operates its own DWDM transport network. Currently it is a 40Gbps system, providing 2.5Gbps router-to-router connectivity for the 8 CERNET GigaPops and reaches all the provincial capitals via a 155Mbps-2.5Gbps backbone. It connects more than 1200 universities and research institutions. Most connected university campus networks are 1Gbps based. The number of end users is about 12 Million. The traffic statistics will be analyzed in this paper and the future bandwidth demand will be estimated. CERNET is also evolving to the next generation Internet. It connects to Internet2 and other next generation academic experimental Internet backbones worldwide. The goals of next generation CERNET are to provide a high-speed backbone network and to offer services to meet the demands of advanced research applications. The challenges are to provide scalable, high speed, high quality network services to all the universities and schools in China and their total 320M students and pupils. The current and future plans of CERNET will also be discussed in this paper, including the nationwide DWDM system, the CWDM MAN and campus network, the unified network management system, the lambda on demand service, the IPv6 service, the multicast service, the wireless services/large scale roaming service and large scale video service.