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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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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 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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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.
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).
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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