A bi-monthly electronic newsletter reporting on the activities of DANTE, the company that organises pan-European research network services for the European research community.
No. 42, January-February 2001
Editor: Marine Chartois
TEN-155 UPGRADES
The backbone network of TEN-155 was upgraded in several places this past couple of months. The interim set of circuits between France and Spain were replaced by a 155 Mbps ATM link on February 12, half of which has been dedicated to US traffic under the DANTE World Service. Two 155 Mbps POS circuits between Germany and Sweden became operational on February 19.
The Infonet interconnection in London was upgraded to 155 Mbps on POS on February 20, giving TEN-155 a 425 Mbps total interconnect with the commercial Internet in Europe.
Finally, the interconnection with the Canadian backbone network CA*net, available to all NRENs connected to TEN-155, was upgraded to 30 Mbps (ATM) on January 17. Multicast connectivity to the Canadian network was enabled the following month, on February 13.
TEN-155 MANAGED BANDWIDTH SERVICE
The TEN-155 MBS successfully supported the IPv6 Conference which took place from January 29 to February 1 in Madrid. This project interconnected sites in Portugal, Austria, Slovenia and Spain with two intercontinental connections to Canada and Japan.
Other projects using the MBS in January and February included LONG, a collaboration project between Spain, Portugal and Denmark, and a connection between France and Italy in the framework of the EC-funded project DSE (http://cec.to.alespazio.it/DSE/).
PROVISION OF THE NETWORK
The results of the tendering process are still being analysed and we expect to be able to announce the name of the suppliers for the various components of the GÉANT network by the end of the spring 2001.
TF-NGN
The GÉANT working groups have been active in refining their test plans and have made significant progress in the specification of a Premium IP service. Several working groups on QoS related issues have contributed to this result. The work will result in Deliverable D9.1 due March 2001.
Other active work items are IPv6, MPLS and multicast, where a distributed infrastructure for monitoring the performance and quality of multicast is being put in place.
SEQUIN
For the definition of Quality of Service, more than 10 interviews of network users have been carried out in order to assess their requirements for QoS. They have been summarised and will be use for a definition of services.
The activity has led to the definition of two services. The first one, IP Premium, is characterised by fixed bandwidth, upper bounded delay, upper bounded jitter and negligible loss. The second service, IP+, is characterised by a minimum guaranteed bandwidth. These services were discussed during the SEQUIN meeting which took place in Berlin on February 12.
A study of the capabilities required by routers to support these services has been conducted, with particular attention to Alcatel, Cisco, Foundry and Juniper products. DANTE is writing a first draft defining the international test bed which will be used by SEQUIN. This test bed will interconnect the PlaGE (RENATER) and GARR-G (GARR) high-speed test beds. A study of time synchronisation mechanism, using NTP or GPS, for the measurement is tacking place.
SECURITY
The design and implementation of a new tool was completed. This tool, based on flow monitoring, is aimed at detecting Denial of Service (DoS) attacks when they occur. It has shown that TEN-155 is almost constantly carrying such attacks, and many DANCERT trouble tickets have been raised to tackle this.
However, tracing such attacks to the source has proven difficult, and a faster inter-domain co-operation between CERTs will be required in the future.
Development of this tool continues in order to eventually produce statistics.
CONFERENCES AND PRESENTATIONS
Agnès Pouélé presented a paper on the TF-TANT MPLS testing at the MPLS conference which took place in London on January 15-18, 2001.
Dai Davies gave a presentation on the new advances in Telecommunications at Lancaster University (GB) on February 13, as well as one on GÉANT at the International Workshop on Next Generation Internet which took place in Tokyo (Japan) on February 21-23.
DANTE will also be present at TNC 2001 with one presentation on the new DoS tool by David Harmelin as well as with an update on GÉANT.
PARTNERS INFORMATION
The RENATER 2bis network became operational on January 17, bringing the French network into Gigabit speeds. More information is available in French as well as in English on RENATER's web site.
