National Research And Education Network Research Articles

Automated Network Services for Exascale Data Movement

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments distribute data by leveraging a diverse array of National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), where experiment data management systems treat networks as a “blackbox” resource. After the High Luminosity upgrade, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment alone will produce roughly 0.5 exabytes of data per year. NREN Networks are a critical part of the success of CMS and other LHC experiments. However, during data movement, NRENs are unaware of data priorities, importance, or need for quality of service, and this poses a challenge for operators to coordinate the movement of data and have predictable data flows across multi-domain networks. The overarching goal of SENSE (The Software-defined network for End-to-end Networked Science at Exascale) is to enable National Labs and universities to request and provision end-to-end intelligent network services for their application workflows leveraging SDN (Software-Defined Networking) capabilities. This work aims to allow LHC Experiments and Rucio, the data management software used by CMS Experiment, to allocate and prioritize certain data transfers over the wide area network. In this paper, we will present the current progress of the integration of SENSE, Multi-domain end-to-end SDN Orchestration with QoS (Quality of Service) capabilities, with Rucio, the data management software used by CMS Experiment.

There is no Open Science without infrastructure and science community

This paper focuses on the role of national-level infrastructure in promoting open science principles, with a specific emphasis on Slovenia. It presents the latest measures implemented within the country to facilitate open science practices.The first part of the paper explores the specific measures adopted in Slovenia to promote open science. It highlights the ongoing development of regulations to implement scientific research following open science principles. The Slovenian Scientific Research and Innovation Activities Act (ZZrID) and the Resolution on the Slovenian Scientific Research and Innovation Strategy 2030 (ReZrIS30) strongly emphasise open science and encompass various measures. The paper discusses the accessibility of research data addressed by the ZZrID and the Decree on the implementation of scientific research work in accordance with the principles of open science. Furthermore, it outlines upcoming actions in education and infrastructure solutions, as outlined in the Open Science Action Plan.The second part of the paper delves into the role of the Academic and Research Network of Slovenia (ARNES), the Slovenian national research and education network (NREN). ARNES has played a pivotal role in the construction of two new national data centres dedicated to the permanent storage of research data. The paper analyses the benefits of these national solutions, which enhance infrastructure accessibility, simplify researchers' work, and provide a more efficient and secure environment for research organisations to store their data. The development of data storage services and the construction of data centres take into consideration existing best practices and collaboration with researchers and research organisations. The solutions offered by the data centres will support existinguniversity repositories and align with the objectives outlined in the Open Science Action Plan. The integration of research funding and evaluation services into a centralised platform will be thoughtfully considered, taking into account the requirements of the research community. A key objective is to enable the implementation of services and infrastructure in accordance with OpenAIRE, where ARNES will play a pivotal role. As a mandated organisation in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and being in touch with best practices in the EU area as an NREN, ARNES is well-positioned to contribute to this endeavour.The paper also highlights the broader objective of improving research quality, efficiency, and responsiveness within the national open science ecosystem. It discusses the establishment of the Slovenian Open Science Community (SSOZ) as part of the tripartite European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) event, making Slovenia one of the pioneering countries in the European Union. The SSOZ, along with Slovenian representatives in the EOSC, has already addressed challenges related to the permanent preservation of research data, which will be comprehensively discussed in relation to the new data centres and associated activities.Additionally, there is a growing demand for education on repository usage and infrastructure upgrades. The Slovenian Open Science Community serves as a unifying platform for all major universities and research institutions in Slovenia, fostering collaboration among its members. It encompasses participants from various initiatives, such as the NI4OS project, which aims to promote the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) at a regional level. Furthermore, the community includes stakeholders from the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) and similar European and institutional initiatives dedicated to advancing open science principles.Drawing from the experience of the case study, the paper critically highlights how the national infrastructure can simplify researchers' work. It emphasises the role of data centres in fostering sustainable and long-term data storage solutions aligned with the principles of open science. As an NREN, ARNES already manages public research infrastructure and offers solutions that facilitate research, such as data sharing and access to EuroHPC's supercomputing infrastructure. The establishment of new data centres by ARNES will significantly enhance the infrastructure for open science in Slovenia, providing primary conditions for implementing open science principles in research work. The implementation of planned professional training programs focused on utilising the infrastructure, along with workshops on open science organised by the Central Technical Library at the University of Ljubljana specifically for researchers in Slovenia, will serve as essential catalysts for enabling research activities that align with the principles of open science. With the infrastructure in place, these initiatives will empower researchers with the necessary knowledge and skills to embrace open science practices effectively.

Leveraging Taxonomical Engineering for Security Baseline Compliance in International Regulatory Frameworks

A surge in successful Information Security (IS) breaches targeting Research and Education (R&E) institutions highlights a pressing need for enhanced protection. Addressing this, a consortium of European National Research and Education Network (NREN) organizations has developed a unified IS framework. This paper aims to introduce the Security Baseline for NRENs and a security maturity model tailored for R&E entities, derived from established security best practices to meet the specific needs of NRENs, universities, and various research institutions. The models currently in existence do not possess a system to smoothly correlate varying requirement tiers with distinct user groups or scenarios, baseline standards, and existing legislative actions. This segmentation poses a significant hurdle to the community’s capacity to guarantee consistency, congruency, and thorough compliance with a cohesive array of security standards and regulations. By employing taxonomical engineering principles, a mapping of baseline requirements to other security frameworks and regulations has been established. This reveals a correlation across most regulations impacting R&E institutions and uncovers an overlap in the high-level requirements, which is beneficial for the implementation of multiple standards. Consequently, organizations can systematically compare diverse security requirements, pinpoint gaps in their strategy, and formulate a roadmap to bolster their security initiatives.

A Model for Knowledge Management Systems in the UbuntuNet Alliance Member Institutions

In the current knowledge-driven global economy, higher education and research institutions are taking a leading role as the hubs for knowledge creation and sharing. In contribution to the needed coordination of the efforts, this paper presents a guiding model thorough assessment of the prevailing status of knowledge resources sharing and collaboration in the regional alliance for education and research networks in the eastern and southern African countries—UbuntuNet Alliance. This research carried out a qualitative study with semi-structured interviews with CEOs of three active national research and education networks (NRENs), representing both the government-run and private consortium-based settings. The study adopted a socio-technical perspective in assessing the technological engagements and the knowledge resources utilization within and among the NRENs in the region. The findings show that the NRENs share a similar set of challenges as well as missions and objectives; they aspire to provide technology-enhanced knowledge-sharing platforms within and across their domains. Finally, it presents UbuntuKMS Model—a comprehensive technology-enhanced knowledge management systems model that intends to provide guidance for the NRENs to orient their efforts accordingly. The research revealed that contextual considerations in developing system solutions are vital as the developing economies experience unique realities on the ground.

The Concept of Internal IP Addresses System for NRENs

This paper presents the concept of a new system of internal IP addresses proposed for use by National Research and Education Networks (NREN). Recently, various systems and services, have been actively developing, such as Wi-Fi, IP telephony, etc., for which it is necessary to ensure the security of streams, reducing the area of collisions, etc. The allocation of additional IP addresses in local networks makes it possible to realize all the abovementioned tasks and have the necessary reserve for future development. The concept is deployed in Academic Scientific Research Computer Network ofArmenia (ASNET-AM).

Quality Improvement and Time to Lift the Ban on Mobile Phones in Secondary Schools

This study was conducted over three months from March to May 2018, at a time when modern mobile phones possess various functions that are invaluable for learning, teaching and communication purposes. Whilst some countries with a quest to improve quality of education, have embraced the continuously evolving technological capacities of mobile phones for educational purposes, secondary school pupils in Zimbabwe are prohibited from using mobile phones in class as these are viewed to be disruptive rather than useful. This study investigated stakeholders’ perceptions of potential utilisation of cell phones by secondary school students as learning tools that enhance quality of education. The sample included 15 secondary schools in Mazowe District. From these, the District Education Officials, headmasters, teachers, pupils and parents were given questionnaires to complete. Validation interviews were conducted for triangulation purposes. The findings revealed strong positive responses in favour of allowing the utilisation of mobile phones as learning tools in Zimbabwean secondary schools although some challenges in the implementation process were cited. These included possibilities of: student distraction in class; cheating; inappropriate video recording of class events and the publication of captured material on social platforms which could be harmful to other learners and the school. The issue of cost of data also came up. The study recommended the removal of the blanket ban on the use of mobile phones; instead, school authorities were encouraged to focus on developing strategies for addressing the implementation challenges cited. It is also critical to make sure that accessible cheap data be made available to learners in secondary schools. Schools in Zimbabwe should form networks so that cheap data is made available by sharing the networks. Schools in Zimbabwe, like institutions of higher learning, are encouraged to embrace the National Research and Education Network (NREN) concept which specialises in internet service provision dedicated to supporting the needs of education in Zimbabwe.

User requirements for national research and education networks for research in West and Central Africa

National research and education networks (NRENs) play a critical role in the development of communication network infrastructure and networked services for researchers and educators. They help close ‘digital divides’ between and within countries and are an essential factor for national and international development. In collaboration with the West and Central African Research and Education Network (WACREN), the TANDEM project has developed a roadmap for the development of NRENs in the region. This was based on the results of a survey that was conducted to investigate user requirements of networked services. The analysis of the 561 responses to a three-part questionnaire divided into 11 education, 22 research and 2 technical management questions identified key educational and research service needs. This article reports on the results of the survey with respect to research services. Highlights include respondents wanting regular access to online conference and academic articles (89%), a range of research services including online library resources, video conferencing, collaboration tools, online data access and storage, online library resources and inter-university login (>87%), access to remote computing facilities (80%) and high performance computing facilities (77%). A desire to share data with others online (74%) was also identified. Respondents also indicated that they would like to access research services through a range of device types–Laptops (96%), Fixed PC (86%) and Mobile Devices (81%). Poor network connectivity was consistently identified as being a major barrier to research in the region.

An architecture for e-learning infrastructures on a national level: a case study of the Afghanistan Research and Education Network

National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) are for sharing resources among member organisations. NRENs play an important role in e-learning activities as they enable cross-organisational communication. Heterogeneous infrastructures used for e-learning are a challenge for system design, data integrity, and interoperability. This paper proposes an NREN e-learning reference architecture and affiliated NREN e-learning design patterns that consider communication, reliable access, a collaboration and interoperability between e-learning infrastructures. Research exists about different architectures including traditional e-learning systems, service-oriented cloud computing such as the service-oriented architecture (SOA) adaptations for education systems, e-learning systems and a service-oriented cloud computing architecture (SOCCA). However, no research has been carried out for NREN e-learning architectures. For deeper insight, we investigate in this paper an e-learning architecture based on the Afghanistan Research and Education Network (AfgREN). The reference e-learning architecture based on AfgREN provides guidance for the rapid development of different e-learning services and learning-analytical infrastructure for Afghanistan.

MEICAN: Simplifying DCN Life-Cycle Management from End-User and Operator Perspectives in Inter-Domain Environments

National research and education networks (NRENs), such as ESnet, GeANT, and RNP, currently promote the employment of dynamic circuit networks (DCNs) to improve scientific communications beyond the capabilities of today's Internet. In spite of their alleged benefits to materialize user-initiated, ad hoc dedicated end-to-end circuits for high-demanding applications, DCNs also pose important challenges. Two examples are dealing with the end-user's lack of ability or willingness to understand low-level technicalities of virtual circuit establishment, and accommodating NRENs' local policies throughout the life-cycle of DCN. In this article, we seek to improve the usability of DCN services with a focus on the inexperienced end-user and the skilled network operator alike. We introduce MEICAN, a platform to manage the life-cycle of DCN from definition to provisioning of virtual circuits. We also present a case study of inter-domain circuit reservation with mixed manual and automated policy checking, and discuss lessons learned, relevant challenges, and open issues still to be overcome.

The Czech National Grid Infrastructure

The Czech National Grid Infrastructure is operated by MetaCentrum, a CESNET department responsible for coordinating and managing activities related to distributed computing. CESNET as the Czech National Research and Education Network (NREN) provides many e-infrastructure services, which are used by 94% of the scientific and research community in the Czech Republic. Computing and storage resources owned by different organizations are connected by fast enough network to provide transparent access to all resources. We describe in more detail the computing infrastructure, which is based on several different technologies and covers grid, cloud and map-reduce environment. While the largest part of CPUs is still accessible via distributed torque servers, providing environment for long batch jobs, part of infrastructure is available via standard EGI tools in EGI, subset of NGI resources is provided into EGI FedCloud environment with cloud interface and there is also Hadoop cluster provided by the same e-infrastructure.A broad spectrum of computing servers is offered; users can choose from standard 2 CPU servers to large SMP machines with up to 6 TB of RAM or servers with GPU cards. Different groups have different priorities on various resources, resource owners can even have an exclusive access. The software is distributed via AFS. Storage servers offering up to tens of terabytes of disk space to individual users are connected via NFS4 on top of GPFS and access to long term HSM storage with peta-byte capacity is also provided. Overview of available resources and recent statistics of usage will be given.

The Internet as a Medium for Education and Educational Research

1bis paper examines the advent of the Internet and its impact on K-12 education and librarianship. It discusses the use of the Internet as a resource for teaching and research and as a virtual classroom and laboratory. In addition, the reasons justifying investment in national supernetworks such as the American National research and Education Network (NREN) and the Canadian Network for the Advancement of Research, Industry, and Education (CANARIE) are outlined. Finally, the implications for education and li brarianship concerning the establishment of these supernetworks are explored.

A participatory Foresight for National Research and Education Networks

The aim of this paper is to show some results from a Foresight study related to future trends about advanced technology services of National Research and Education Networks (NREN). The approach of this study was conducted by using Foresight methods, which means: a planning process in order to obtain the definition of the exercise scope, the establishment of relevant aspects for asking international experts about the aim of this Foresight study. These experts are directors of several NREN around the world. The main result concludes, among other things, that more network services are being built to provide dark fibber links to users, increasing the flexibility and agility in the delivery of new and better services. It is a trend that will continue and that should be encouraged. Also, collaborations with mobile service providers should be established to offer academically innovative solutions to users. Other results show that there is a potential, which opens the participation of non-university hospitals for remote care in the health sector. This is corroborated in the expert’s opinion to qualify for being of high importance for the connectivity of hospitals and clinics. The results of this study are useful for any NREN around the world, but especially they have been used as input for the Colombian NREN.

Transitional Approaches for PERN Migration to SDN

With the emerging concepts of internet of things (IoT), bring your own device (BYOD), smart homes, vehicular adhoc networks 9VANETS), mobility and new service demands, legacy networking approaches are being considered complex and inefficient. In recent past a new approach called software defined networks (SDN) has emerged to revolutionize the four decades old networking approaches. The SDN's capacity to programmatically control and modify the network behavior has given extra edge to its wide scale proliferation. After some large scale successful deployments by Google, VMware, Facebook etc., SDN has attained huge research and vendor attention. Almost all large scale national research and education networks (NRENs) have prepared Opne flow based SDN test beds for collaborative future networking research.Pakistan education Research Network (PERN) project is still lagging behind in utilizing its network infrastructure for research and experimentation purpose. Although, green filed network migration of PERN is a challenging task and requires lot of budget and technical expertise, transitional approaches are the best way to migrate from legacy networking to SDN. This study highlights the role of SDN and its deployments in educational research networks for next generation network experimentation. This study proposes transitional approaches for the migration of PERN towards OpenFlow based SDN environment. In this study, it will also discuss how SDN based PERN can facilitate IT, telecommunications, software engineering, computer scientist and network engineering researchers in conducting future network experimentation.

An Xrootd Italian Federation

The Italian community in CMS has built a geographically distributed network in which all the data stored in the Italian region are available to all the users for their everyday work. This activity involves at different level all the CMS centers: the Tier1 at CNAF, all the four Tier2s (Bari, Rome, Legnaro and Pisa), and few Tier3s (Trieste, Perugia, Torino, Catania, Napoli, ...). The federation uses the new network connections as provided by GARR, our NREN (National Research and Education Network), which provides a minimum of 10 Gbit/s to all the sites via the GARR-X[2] project. The federation is currently based on Xrootd[1] technology, and on a Redirector aimed to seamlessly connect all the sites, giving the logical view of a single entity. A special configuration has been put in place for the Tier1, CNAF, where ad-hoc Xrootd changes have been implemented in order to protect the tape system from excessive stress, by not allowing WAN connections to access tape only files, on a file-by-file basis. In order to improve the overall performance while reading files, both in terms of bandwidth and latency, a hierarchy of xrootd redirectors has been implemented. The solution implemented provides a dedicated Redirector where all the INFN sites are registered, without considering their status (T1, T2, or T3 sites). An interesting use case were able to cover via the federation are disk-less Tier3s. The caching solution allows to operate a local storage with minimal human intervention: transfers are automatically done on a single file basis, and the cache is maintained operational by automatic removal of old files.

Multi-domain Information Exchange in a Bandwidth on Demand Tool

In this paper we describe the multi-domain information exchange aspects of the AutoBAHN tool, which is used for implementing a Bandwidth on Demand service as part of the GEANT project. This project was driven by the increasing demand for reliable and guaranteed data transportation for scientific purposes. In order to implement the process of information exchange in a multi-domain heterogeneous environment several design decisions have to take place, in order to balance and satisfy by the needs of information security, fast information dissemination, efficient request processing, reliability and robustness. The paper describes how AutoBAHN implements a flexible AAI in a distributed environment, how it exchanges and updates information and how it handles incoming requests in an efficient and timely manner. The multi-domain aspect of this effort stems from the fact that the tool is used in the production environment of several cooperating National Research and Educational Networks (NRENs) across Europe. Each NREN may have different underlying technologies, different policies and different use cases, but they all have to coordinate through usage of the AutoBAHN tool in order to produce a multi-domain service of circuit reservation

DNSSEC meets real world: dealing with unreachability caused by fragmentation

The Domain Name System (DNS) provides a critical service on the Internet: translating host names into IP addresses. Traditional DNS does not provide guarantees about authenticity and origin integrity. DNSSEC, an extension to DNS, improves this by using cryptographic signatures, at the expense of larger response messages. Some of these larger response messages experience fragmentation, and may, as a result of that, be blocked by firewalls. As a consequence, resolvers behind such firewalls will no longer receive complete responses from name servers, leading to certain Internet zones becoming unreachable because no translation into IP addresses can be performed. Our research shows that despite ongoing efforts to educate firewall and resolver administrators, as much as 10 percent of all resolvers suffer from fragmentation-related connectivity issues. Given that some major Internet companies were reluctant to adopt even a technology like IPv6 if it meant that a small percentage of their users would have connectivity issues, it is clear that we cannot rely on resolver/firewall operators alone to tackle this issue. The contribution of this article is that it a) quantifies the severity of these DNSSEC deployment problems, based on extensive measurements at a major National Research and Education Network (NREN) and backed up by validation of these findings at an independent second location, b) proposes two potential solutions at the DNS authoritative name server side, and c) validates both solutions, again based on extensive measurements on the operational network of this major NREN. The article concludes with a recommendation favoring our first solution. The first solution is relatively simple to implement and gives DNS zone operators control over this problem without having to rely on all resolver operators solving the issue

Improving Infrastructure, Service and Knowledge by “Campus Best Practices” Model

This paper summarises the participation of AMRES, the National Research and Education Network (NREN) of Serbia in the GÉANT “Campus Best Practices” (GN3 NA3/T4) task and the experience and the results that have been achieved by AMRES. Four NRENs are contributing: UNINETT (Norway), CSC/Funet (Finland), CESNET (the Czech Republic) and AMRES (Serbia). Of these, Serbia is the only one which faces the problem of poor technological development, the so-called ‘digital divide’ problem. The NRENs that are faced with this problem pay their full attention and spend overall budget on the improvement of their backbone infrastructure and services, and their external NREN connections. Insufficient attention has been focused on understanding and mitigating the problems of discontinuity in the quality of infrastructure, services and the expertise of staff, which generally exists between the NREN backbone and the campus network. The GÉANT “Campus Best Practices” task examines a working model as one possible solution for the problem.

Design and Implementation of Lightpath Control System for TWAREN Optical Networks

With the explosive growth of the Internet, various applications are developed for exploring science discovery. Their common feature is the desire for higher network bandwidth than before. In the last decade, network backbone has been upgraded from 155Mbps with ATM technology to Gigabit Ethernet or 10 Gigabit Ethernet to meet this trend. However, there are some next-generation e-science applications such as video streaming, high-quality images and grid computing which need the optical network to provide higher bandwidth with QoS guarantee. In the past, national research and education networks (NRENs) around the world strive for developing the control layer of optical network. TWAREN [1] establishes an optical network laboratory to investigate the next-generation network with optical technology. The laboratory supports not only SDH and next-generation SDH functions, but also DWDM functions which offer a hybrid network platform for domestic and international research projects. In our on-going LightPath control project, we develop a control system with automatic lightpath establishment, restoration and recovery functions to manage optical devices in our laboratory. We will integrate our control system with TWAREN NOC to facilitate the network operation and reduce the cost of operation in the future.

A new framework for GLIF Interdomain Resource Reservation Architecture (GIRRA)

Many existing and emerging Scientific high-end applications (E-science) require end-to-end circuits interconnecting Grid resources for large data transfers. A few advanced networks, mainly National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), such as Surfnet, National Lambda Rail and Internet 2, now provide mechanisms for end-users to reserve and provision lightpaths via middleware referred to as Network Resource Mangers (NRMs). Although, some progress has been made in automated intra-domain lightpath services, inter-domain lightpath provisioning still requires manual intervention and presents several key challenges such as scalability of topology information exchanged, consistency and scalability of information model, security of access to the resources, hybrid networking and multi-layer lightpaths, and accounting and billing. In this paper, we describe a new architectural framework called Global Lambda Integrated Facility (GLIF) Interdomain Resource Reservation Architecture (GIRRA) with the goal to provide an integrated response to these challenges. We propose a new approach to model GLIF network domains and GOLEs as virtual switches and to describe their behavior, functionality, policy capabilities, and topology aggregation. We define an inter-domain path computation model to determine paths that meet constraints and access policy restrictions. We propose a security framework for authentication and authorization of users and a model for accounting and billing that aims to provide easy and secure access to the resources. Key aspects of the GIRRA solution are that it focuses on the inter-dependence between different challenges of inter-domain path provision, and it is built around already existing solutions for intra-domain resource provisioning.

Multipath routing for eVLBI

Abstract The very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) technique currently demands data storage resources of about 2 TBytes per day which must be analyzed in correlation centers. The current process involves the physical storing and shipping of magnetic disks to these centers, where up to 5 days are needed for transportation. The need of a fast turnaround opened a new research line where all the collected data of observing radiotelescope stations is sent over the Internet. This technique is called eVLBI. Ideally the station is part of a National Research and Education Network (NREN) where multiple intercontinental routes are available. Under this scenario a new protocol has been developed which allows multiple parallel data flows with important throughput improvements. The unique properties of VLBI data imply the development of a custom load control based on user datagram protocol (UDP). A description of the new protocol and performance comparisons of the first demonstrations for eVLBI performed at the Transportable Integrated Geodetic Observatory (TIGO) are included in the present article.