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Having started in Europe, eduroam has gained momentum throughout the research and education community and is now available in 90 territories worldwide (https://www.eduroam.org/where/).

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In a nutshell, eduroam allows students, researchers and staff from participating institutions to obtain Internet connectivity across campus and when visiting other participating institutions by simply opening their laptop.

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The WP3 questions asked in the survey were about eduroam, which is considered in this Section 1, and also about network connectivity and policy at schools, which is discussed in Section 2. From February to April 2017, the WP3 questions were prepared and reviewed by project partners in several iterative cycles. The questionnaire was also tested by some of the high school teachers collaborating with project partners. The questions were straightforward but required some technical knowledge about the schools’ facilities. Most of the questions were closed-ended. The questionnaire was provided in English in most cases, apart from Italy, where it had been first translated to the local language. All the WP3 questions asked in the survey are reported in Appendix B.

From May to June 2017, the survey was sent to all the 53 pilot candidate schools. Each surveyed school was contacted directly, and in some countries face-to-face meetings were organised with school representatives to present the project to them and invite them in person to join the surveys and future pilots. Those meetings are reported in Deliverable D2.2 Dissemination and Outreach Report Year 1, as part of the local dissemination activity undertaken in the first year of the project, but also in Section 3.2 of Deliverable D7.2 Report on the First Release and Demonstration of Scalable Pilot Services, which describes the development of country-specific approaches in the engagement of pilot schools.

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The leaders with regard to promoting and implementing eduroam at high schools are Croatia and Hungary, in which more than one thousand schools provide eduroam networks. The two countries also reported that implementations were possible because of funding received for building or renewing IT infrastructure at schools.

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The current version of this deliverable includes all 68 170 schools that have been engaged in the project’s activities from six seven out of eight countries. No schools are yet known from Germany and Portugal. The schools are all Some of the schools were already reported in Deliverable Deliverables D7.1 and Deliverable. , D7.2. Please note that some schools appear in both the deliverables, and some appear in just one of them (see Section 3.2 of Deliverable D7.2 for information on the evolution of the lists of pilot schools). In this analysis, all such identified schools are considered., and D7.3.

Since network availability is the key to the always-on education concept, neither formal nor informal learning scenarios would benefit from the limitation of eduroam access to particular location types such as campuses, museums, libraries, labs or public places. Thus students and teachers should have the capability to use eduroam wherever it is available. This analysis therefore provides information on all available locations near the schools.

Analysis has shown that availability of eduroam in the neighbourhood of the pilot schools is very high. In 43% 40% of cases, it is possible to find eduroam access within walking distance from the school (less than 1 km). Most of the pilot schools (68%62%) are located less than 5 km from the closest eduroam location.

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The average number of eduroam locations available within 20 km from a pilot school varies from country to country and can reach up to 7563.14 59 locations.

Therefore, the objective of the project seems to be feasible, i.e. not to deploy eduroam at new locations, but to study the current availability of eduroam and to investigate solutions that enable students to get access to the network at existing locations, that can then be covered by the formal and informal learning scenarios.

Detailed information on eduroam availability in the neighbourhood of the particular pilot schools can be found inAppendix A: Eduroam near schools - details.

The pilot schools, as well as eduroam availability in their neighbourhood, are depicted in the interactive map below (click the map). Please note that it is focused on the currently known pilot schools only, as more general information on all eduroam locations is already publicly accessible.

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The data by country is presented in the following sections.

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Number of pilot schools: 11
Average number of eduroam locations eduroams within distance of 20 km from the pilot school: 25 24.6473
Table: Average number of eduroam locations eduroams within given distance from the pilot school.

Table: Number of pilot schools within given distance from any eduroam access.

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Number of pilot schools: 10
Average number of eduroam locations eduroams within distance of 20 km from the pilot school: 50.6070
Table: Average number of eduroam locations eduroams within given distance from the pilot school.

Table: Number of pilot schools within given distance from any eduroam access.

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1.4.2.3 Italy

Number of pilot schools: 19 41
Average number of eduroam locations eduroams within distance of 20 km from the pilot school: 19 21.79 85
Table: Average number of eduroam locations eduroams within given distance from the pilot school.

Table: Number of pilot schools within given distance from any eduroam access.

1.4.2.4 Lithuania

Number of pilot schools: 7 71
Average number of eduroam locations eduroams within distance of 20 km from the pilot school: 75 46.14 97
Table: Average number of eduroam locations eduroams within given distance from the pilot school.

Table: Number of pilot schools within given distance from any eduroam access.

1.4.2.5 Poland

Number of pilot schools: 18 22
Average number of eduroam locations eduroams within distance of 20 km from the pilot school: 64 63.44 59
Table: Average number of eduroam locations eduroams within given distance from the pilot school.

Table: Number of pilot schools within given distance from any eduroam access.

1.4.2.6

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Portugal

Number of pilot schools: 3 8
Average number of eduroam locations eduroams within distance of 20 km from the pilot school: 1 21.00 13
Table: Average number of eduroam locations eduroams within given distance from the pilot school.

Table: Number of pilot schools within given distance from any eduroam access.

1.4.2.

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7 Spain

Number of pilot schools: 7
Average number of eduroams within distance of 20 km from the pilot school: 5.86
Table: Average number of eduroams within given distance from the pilot school.

Table: Number of pilot schools within given distance from any eduroam access.

2. Overview of Internet Connectivity at Pilot Schools

To better analyse and assess the status of the initial pilot schools in terms of network connectivity and network policies, surveys were conducted. The surveys were carried out as a collaborative effort between Work Packages 3, 5 and 6 to collect, from the initially known pilot schools, the necessary information relevant to development planned in each of these Work Packages.

Please note that the goal of the general connectivity and policy questions was not to come to any conclusions that can be generalised to apply to all European schools. The results are provided to enable the consortium to solve a chicken-egg problem, i.e. learn first about the context of the initial pilot schools and, based on that, create the first version of the Toolbox with first use cases, to update them later based on feedback from pilots.

Please note also that requesting information on network facilities and policies at the initial pilot schools, apart from the eduroam analysis, is a step beyond the scope of this deliverable as defined in the Description of Work. However, the survey was considered to be a good opportunity to learn about the context of the first schools planned to join project’s pilots.

This overview is based on the same surveying activity as

To better analyse and assess the status of the initial pilot schools in terms of network connectivity and network policies, surveys were conducted. The surveys were carried out as a collaborative effort between Work Packages 3, 5 and 6 to collect, from the initially known pilot schools, the necessary information relevant to development planned in each of these Work Packages.

Please note that the goal of the general connectivity and policy questions was not to come to any conclusions that can be generalised to apply to all European schools. The results are provided to enable the consortium to solve a chicken-egg problem, i.e. learn first about the context of the initial pilot schools and, based on that, create the first version of the Toolbox with first use cases, to update them later based on feedback from pilots.

Please note also that requesting information on network facilities and policies at the initial pilot schools, apart from the eduroam analysis, is a step beyond the scope of this deliverable as defined in the Description of Work. However, the survey was considered to be a good opportunity to learn about the context of the first schools planned to join project’s pilots.

This overview is based on the same surveying activity as described in Section 1.1. That survey also contained questions about network connectivity and policies. All the questions can be found in Appendix B.

The survey results obtained provide information about the environment of the schools that are most likely to be engaged in the Up2U ecosystem, and are summarised in the following sections.

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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.

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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 GÉANT IP, giving not only assured performance but also security of the transferred data.

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The idea of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) is to distribute services spatially relative to end users to provide high availability and high performance. A CDN is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers. Its main goal is to deliver content more quickly and more reliably.

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Image source: www.cdnreviews.com

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One One of the possible implementations is based on a geo-located Domain Name System (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 original server is needed. Otherwise, the edge server first fetches the content from the original server, and the first user requesting this particular piece of data waits for the response a little bit longer.

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It could be beneficial to build a CDN that handles users’ requests for content from content repositories. Accessing large multimedia objects physically located in one country by a user in another country far away will result in the drawbacks outlined above, for instance, longer download times, larger latencies, greater network load, and increased 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 video file must be transferred through the backbone network 20 times – the same data is sent across Europe 20 times and all 20 users have to 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 19 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 video would be handled by a small content provider’s server from the other end of Europe. The overall technical architecture of the eduOER and CDN integration is presented in the Figure below.

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We are currently investigating a prototype CDN with edge servers located in London, Poznan and Athens. The preliminary tests confirm that the physical locations of a client and a server strongly influence the data transfer times and, as a result, the network load too. More tests will be conducted with the first content repositories federated with eduOER. We will also analyse how to implement the CDN to ensure it is easy to add 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 end points taking part in communication will dynamically change. However, the point-to-point 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 physical 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 a sync and 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).

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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.

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The GÉANT backbone network obviously focuses on connections with the R&E networks more than on peering with commercial providers. Considering the always-on education concept promoted by Up2U and the necessary accessibility of the ecosystem from any network and device, we should monitor users’ types of Internet connections during the project lifetime. Depending on the future scale and the load generated by commercial ISP users, decisions can be made about whether to change GÉANT’s network peering policy to extend peering with commercial providers.

Appendix A: eduroam near Schools

Appendix: eduroam near Schools – Details

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appendix_b appendix_b

Appendix B: Survey Questions

1. How is your school connected to the Internet?
   1. via NREN
   2. via a commercial provider
   3. other (please specify)
2. Please indicate the total internet bandwidth in your school for downloading
   1. Less than 5 Mb / s
   2. Up to 10 Mb / s
   3. Up to 20 Mb / s
   4. Up to 40 Mb / s
   5. Up to 80 Mb / s
   6. Up to 160 Mb / s
   7. Over 160 Mb / s
3. Please indicate the total internet bandwidth in your school for uploading
   1. Less than 5 Mb / s
   2. Up to 10 Mb / s
   3. Up to 20 Mb / s
   4. Up to 40 Mb / s
   5. Up to 80 Mb / s
   6. Up to 160 Mb / s
   7. Above 160 Mb / s
4. What is the arrangement of the internal cable network (Ethernet) in your school
   1. The school does not have a cable network
   2. The school has a link cable only in some rooms are not being used in the classroom
   3. The school has a link cable in some classrooms
   4. The school has a cable connection in all classrooms
5. Do you have WiFi network at your school?
   1. Yes, and it's freely accesible for students in all classes
   2. Yes, but it isn't freely accesible for students in all classes
   3. No
6. What is the coverage of the WiFi network in your school?
   1. 100% of the school
   2. 100% of the classrooms, but not 100% of the school
   3. other (please specify)
7. Is eduroam available at your school?
   1. Yes
   2. No
8. Is eduroam available at other locations, either near your school or that are usually visited by your students?
   1. Yes
   2. No
9. Which are these locations?
   1. Public library
   2. Private library
   3. Youth centers
   4. other (please specify)
10. Are your students able to authenticate to eduroam?
    1. Yes
    2. No
11. How? (please specify)
12. Can students connect their private devices to the Internet at school:
    1. During the lessons in the manner specified by the teacher
    2. Besides school classes to a limited extent (eg. Only to have access to local educational materials)
    3. Besides school classes in any way
13. Is your school using an hardware firewall?
    1. Yes
    2. No
    3. I don’t know
14. Is your school using a UTM device (Unified threat management) - a multi-firewall?
    1. Yes
    2. No
    3. I don’t know
15. Which are the functions of your UTM?
    1. spam filter: Yes – No – I don’t know
    2. anti-virus filter: Yes – No – I don’t know
    3. intrusion detection: Yes – No – I don’t know
    4. content filtering: Yes – No – I don’t know
    5. other (please specify)

Glossary

BoD            Bandwidth on Demand

BYOD        Bring Your Own Device

CDN           Content Delivery Network

CERN        Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire / European Organisation for Nuclear Research

DNS           Domain Name System

DoW           Description of Work

eduroam     education roaming

EMBL         European Molecular Biology Laboratory

ESA           European Space Agency

IP               Internet Protocol

ISP             Internet Service Provider

L3-VPN      Layer 3 Virtual Private Network

LMS           Learning Management System

MD-VPN    Multi-Domain Virtual Private Network

NREN        National Research and Education Network

OER           Open Educational Resources

PoP            Point of Presence

R&E           Research and Education

SKA           Square Kilometre Array

T                 Task

T3.1            Task 3.1, Network Services and Access

UTM           Unified Threat Management

VPN           Virtual Private Network

WebRTC    Web-based Real-Time Communication

WP             Work Package

WP3           Work Package 3, Cloud-Based Infrastructure Services

WP4           Work Package 4, Integrated Application Toolbox

WP5           Work Package 5, Learning Community Management and Skills Training

WP6           Work Package 6, Roadmap for Security and Trust

WP7           Work Package 7, Pilot Coordination and Continuous Risk Assessment: Eduroam near schools - details