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This section summarises results of Up2U surveys filled up by the initial pilot schools. The surveying activity was a result of common efforts and cooperation of Work Packages no. 3, 5, 6. Information on schoolschools' s connectivity and policies has been provided by 29 initial pilot schools from 6 different countries (Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, and Spain).
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GÉANT Multi-Domain Virtual Private Network (MD-VPN) is designed to increase privacy and control over data transfers. MD-VPN enables end-computers to collaborate via a common private network infrastructure. It offers fast setups of new VPNs to clients and so can be used in a variety of ways, from a long-term infrastructure with a high demand for intensive network usage to quick point-to-point connections for a conference demonstration.
GÉANT L3-VPN provides a VPN in which each party can have an allocated bandwidth from 155 Mbps to 100 Gbps, according to its own requirements. This service allocates unique virtual local area network identifiers to each L3-VPN to ensure data isolation across the GÉANT IP, giving not only assured performance but also security of the transferred data.
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One of possible implementations is based on geo-located Domain Name Server (DNS) service that responds to a user’s domain lookup query indicating the IP address of the proxy (edge) server that is the “nearest” for the user. Then, the user communicates with the edge server and, if the edge server has the desired content (cache), no transfer to and from the origin server is needed. Otherwise, the edge server fetches first the content from the origin server, and the first user requesting this particular piece of data waits for the response a little bit longer.
Various benefits can come from using CDN. From end-user perspective, it is an increased Quality of Experience: data download time and latency are reduced, and availability of the service is improved (if a desired data is available in an edge server then a downtime of the origin server does not prevent users to access the data). From the network perspective, CDN provides better network performance: the number of hops during the data transfers is reduced, possibility of bandwidth saturation is lowered, and the traffic in backbone network is also reduced. From the content provider perspective CDN causes lower costs: less network load and reduced possibility of service downtime.
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It could be useful to build a CDN which handles users’ requests for content from content repositories. Accessing large multimedia objects physically located in one country by a user from another country far away will result with the drawbacks outlined before, for instance longer download times, larger latencies, larger network load, and greater possibility of service downtime. Consider the case, that 20 students from Portugal are running the same video, physically located in a content repository in Greece, during a class. The large movie must be transferred through the backbone network 20 times - the same data is sent 20 times across the Europe and all the users wait for the transfer. If there was a CDN with an edge server in Portugal, then the content would be sent once from Greece to Portugal, it would be cached at the edge server, and the rest of the students would be served more quickly with the cached copy. Note that the benefits scale with the number of students, classrooms, and pilot schools - without a CDN all requests for such a movie would be handled by a small content provider’s server from the other end of Europe.
We currently investigate a prototype of CDN with edge servers located in London, Poznan and Athens. The first tests confirms that the physical locations of a client and a server strongly influence times of data transfers and, as a result, the network load too. More tests will be conducted with first content repositories federated with eduOER. It must be also well analyzed how to implement the CDN in order to provide the ease of adding new edge servers and new repositories in the future.
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The point-to-point network services (GÉANT Plus and GÉANT Lambda) cannot support communication paths between end-users and the ecosystem services, and also between two end-users (e.g. for WebRTC tutoring sessions), because of the multiplicity of the end-points and because the set of the end-points taking part in communication will dynamically change. However, the network services can be applied for static connections between some end-points that host the ecosystem, and are physically distributed among different locations. Such end-points could be an end-user service hosted in one physcial location and its required back-end service hosted in another location, if they exchange large amounts of data. For instance, if we provided an LMS service from the infrastructure in Poland and sync&storage service, being a back-end for the LMS, from the infrastructure in Switzerland, and assuming they sent heavy content between each other, then it would be beneficial to support the communication between these services with GÉANT Plus (or GÉANT Lambda, depending on particular bandwidth needs or predictions).
A communication that we can definitely improve is end-users’ access to static data. Most of the static data we deal with in the project can be found in content repositories of multimedia objects. As shown in the previous section, this is where a CDN can be successfully implemented, and the effectiveness of the CDN can be improved by the underlying network. The point-to-point network services cannot be applied for this case, because it would be then difficult and expensive to add new edge servers and set up circuits between a new server and all existing repositories. However, the VPN solutions from GÉANT portfolio could be easily used to support the CDN. If we put all the content repositories (i.e. origin servers) and the edge servers in a common MD-VPN or L3-VPN, then it will be easy and costless to quickly manage changes: adding or removing edge servers or repositories. In this case, data isolation across the GÉANT IP and even an allocated bandwidth could be ensured.
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However, smaller impact is put on peering with commercial providers, as GÉANT backbone network obviously focuses on connections with the R&E networks, as given above. However, considering the Always-on education concept promoted by Up2U and the necessary accessibility to the ecosystem from any network and device, one could give advice on extending GÉANT network peering policy to other kinds of network operators.
Appendix: Eduroam near schools - details