GÉANT Project Objectives
The GÉANT project has four key objectives. These are:
- Gigabit speeds
- Geographical expansion
- Global connectivity
- Guaranteed quality of service
These are described in detail below.
Gigabit Speeds
Both transmission and routing technology now enable transmission speeds of 10Gbps and beyond. GÉANT is taking full advantage of these developments. It is thus complementing the National Research and Education Networks already using gigabit speeds or currently implementing them. It is allowing these NRENs to use their resources at their full potential at a pan-European level, and beyond that, on a global basis.
16 circuits at the core of the network now operate at speeds of 10Gbps (increased from nine circuits when the network launched in December 2001), while 16 others run at 2.5Gbps. GÉANT is the most advanced network of its kind in the world in terms of speeds.
GÉANT continues the trend set by its predecessor, TEN-155. The much improved capacity and greater availability offered by TEN-155, when compared to its own predecessor, TEN-34, had encouraged a very significant increase in use of the network. It also allowed users to employ new applications to support their own research. As a result, TEN-155 had become an essential tool to support co-operative pan-European research and development.
In developing GÉANT, it was vital to guarantee the continuity of service to existing users. This included continuity with the TEN-155 service, which provided the interconnection between European research networks. At the same time, however, novel technologies that are still currently unproven on such a large scale have been adopted in order to support new high performance services for users.
Geographical Expansion
Historically, each succeeding generation of European research network has included more European countries than its predecessor. GÉANT continues this trend.
In addition to the countries that were connected to TEN-155, GÉANT provides service to all of the European Union ‘Accession States’ that joined the Union in 2004. It also serves all four of the applicant countries (Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania and Turkey). GÉANT is thus a major pan-European collaboration, with more participants than the European Union itself!
In total, by its conclusion in June 2005 the GÉANT backbone interconnected more than 3,500 research and education institutions in 34 countries through 30 national and regional research and education networks.
Global Connectivity
Research co-operation is becoming an increasingly global activity and the requirement for interconnection with other world regions is constantly expanding.
As a result, the development of connectivity with equivalent research and education networks in other world regions is an important element of GÉANT. Improving global connectivity has been a continuous effort and GÉANT now has 12Gbps connectivity to North America, 2.5Gbps to Japan and 155Mbps to South Africa.
Many of the Southern Mediterranean countries are now connected to GÉANT via the EUMEDCONNECT network, while for Latin America, the ALICE project has created a link to GÉANT's Madrid PoP from São Paulo in Brazil. Work is also underway to establish an additional connection to GÉANT for NRENs from the Asia-Pacific region (via TEIN2).
International connectivity in GÉANT is achieved through European Distributed Access, which provides a number of access points for connection with other world regions. The existence of the multi-gigabit core enables this connectivity to be efficiently and equitably shared among the connected countries. The multi-location approach facilitates the most cost-effective provision of connectivity.
Guaranteed Quality of Service
Guaranteed quality of service (QoS) is vital for the provision of new applications, as well as for the creation of virtual private networks (VPNs) to support the needs of projects and groups of researchers. The Managed Bandwidth Service that had been a feature of TEN-155 had addressed these needs by using a combination of IP and ATM technology (the latter no longer being supported in GÉANT). GÉANT builds on the achievements of TEN-155, together with developments in IP QoS, offering new means of guaranteed QoS as a basic feature of its portfolio of services.
IP technology has been extremely successful in providing ubiquitous connectivity. It is a world standard that allows communication between millions of machines. Its major weakness is that, until recently, it has been unable to offer any guarantees of QoS to its users.
GÉANT has initiated a set of service developments that were needed in this field. New service features have been introduced, covering a range of requirements from priority for specified types of traffic to VPNs in support of technology development.
Such new features exploit a mixture of underlying technologies, since it will not be possible to introduce the latest technologies and the highest capacities in all European countries simultaneously. It is a key goal that users in each of the connected countries should be able to access the same services, and have an equal and expanding opportunity to profit from the capabilities of the GÉANT network.
The development and trialing of the Premium IP service was worked on for many months by the TF-NGN task-force, and as a part of the GÉANT project itself. Work carried out on the definition of a Premium IP service was done within the European project SEQUIN. The Premium IP service has been deployed across the GÉANT network as a production service.
