This document is now under reconstruction.
Up2U Deliverable D3.1
Contractual Date: | 30-06-2017 |
Actual Date: | First release: 09-11-2018 Recently updated: 04-06-2020 – new engaged schools, new eduroam locations. |
Grant Agreement No.: | 732049 – Up2U |
Work Package: | WP3 |
Task Item: | Task 3.1 |
Nature of Deliverable: | R (Report) |
Dissemination Level: | PU (Public) |
Lead Partner: | PSNC |
Authors: | Tomasz Kuczyński (PSNC), Michał Zimniewicz (PSNC), Krzysztof Kurowski (PSNC), Bogdan Ludwiczak (PSNC), Dariusz Stachecki (PSNC), Dawid Szejnfeld (PSNC), Ilias Hatzakis (GRNET), Peter Szegedi (GÉANT) |
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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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Country | Schools with eduroam | Reported problems | |
Austria | 0 | No template for ICT equipment in schools NREN has no capacity to make a change | |
Croatia | ca. 50% out of 2729 connected by NREN |
| |
Czech Republic | 20 out of 98 connected by NREN |
| |
France | 0 | BYOD is banned by law at schools | |
Greece | 0 | ||
Hungary | 1700 out of 6677 connected by NREN |
| |
Italy | 13 out of 738 connected by NREN |
| |
Ireland | 0 | No template for ICT equipment in schools Issues with implementation of identity providers for students | |
Lithuania | NREN supports eduroam at schools | Content filtering policy | |
Netherlands | NREN supports eduroam at schools | ||
Poland | 0 | Content filtering policy | |
Portugal | 0 | ||
Romania | NREN supports eduroam at schools | ||
Serbia | 60 out of 1700 connected by NREN | ||
Slovenia | 100 out of 755 connected by NREN | No incentives for schools and NREN Funding issues Various network access policies regarding students | |
Sweden | NREN supports eduroam at schools | Issues with implementation of identity providers for students | |
UK | 0 |
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.
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.
Distance from the school | Average number of eduroam locationsof eduroams |
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Less than 1 km | 1.00 |
Between 1 and 5 km | 8.82 |
Between 5 and 10 km | 7.5500 |
Between 10 and 20 km | 87.2791 |
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.
Distance from the school | Average number of eduroam locationseduroams |
---|---|
Less than 1 km | 3.10 |
Between 1 and 5 km | 15.60 |
Between 5 and 10 km | 20.00 |
Between 10 and 20 km | 1112.9000 |
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.
Distance from the school | Average number of eduroam locationseduroams |
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Less than 1 km | 01.1605 |
Between 1 and 5 km | 25.1688 |
Between 5 and 10 km | 6.5871 |
Between 10 and 20 km | 108.8922 |
Table: Number of pilot schools within given distance from any eduroam access.
Distance | Number of pilot schools |
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Less than 1 km | 210 |
Between 1 and 5 km | 35 |
Between 5 and 10 km | 48 |
Between 10 and 20 km | 47 |
More than 20 km | 611 |
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.
Distance from the school | Average number of eduroam locationseduroams |
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Less than 1 km | 113.1444 |
Between 1 and 5 km | 4719.4361 |
Between 5 and 10 km | 16.2973 |
Between 10 and 20 km | 07.2920 |
Table: Number of pilot schools within given distance from any eduroam access.
Distance | Number of pilot schools |
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Less than 1 km | 531 |
Between 1 and 5 km1 | 15 |
Between 5 and 10 km | 05 |
Between 10 and 20 km | 07 |
More than 20 km | 113 |
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.
Distance from the school | Average number of eduroam locationseduroams |
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Less than 1 km | 76.3982 |
Between 1 and 5 km | 4644.9418 |
Between 5 and 10 km | 810.3391 |
Between 10 and 20 km | 1.7868 |
Table: Number of pilot schools within given distance from any eduroam access.
Distance | Number of pilot schools |
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Less than 1 km | 1112 |
Between 1 and 5 km | 34 |
Between 5 and 10 km | 0 |
Between 10 and 20 km | 0 |
More than 20 km | 46 |
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.
Distance from the school | Average number of eduroam locationseduroams |
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Less than 1 km | 0.0088 |
Between 1 and 5 km | 06.3338 |
Between 5 and 10 km | 012.6738 |
Between 10 and 20 km | 01.0050 |
Table: Number of pilot schools within given distance from any eduroam access.
Distance | Number of pilot schools |
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Less than 1 km | 03 |
Between 1 and 5 km1 | 4 |
Between 5 and 10 km | 21 |
Between 10 and 20 km | 0 |
1
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.4.2.7 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.
Distance from the school | Average number of eduroams |
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Less than 1 km | 0.14 |
Between 1 and 5 km | 0.57 |
Between 5 and 10 km | 0.86 |
Between 10 and 20 km | 4.29 |
Table: Number of pilot schools within given distance from any eduroam access.
Distance | Number of pilot schools |
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Less than 1 km | 1 |
Between 1 and 5 km | 0 |
Between 5 and 10 km | 0 |
Between 10 and 20 km | 1 |
More than 20 km | 5 |
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 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
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To better analyse and assess the statuses of the initial pilot schools in terms of network connectivity, surveys were conducted targeted at the schools’ principals and technical managers. The surveys were carried out as a collaborative effort between Work Packages 3, 5, 6 and 7 to collect the necessary information relevant to actions undertaken by each of these from the chosen schools.
The population of interest were schools joining an initial phase of pilot activities. At that time, it was planned to involve about 30 schools for the initial actions, in line with the assumptions from the Description of Work. The goal of this research was to be able to generalise the survey results obtained for a sample to describe the whole population, i.e. initially participating schools. The sample consisted of the set of all schools known at that stage that had been invited to join future pilot activities. This sample may eventually prove to already include the whole population of interest or, more likely, represent a majority of the final population.
The survey was conducted in the form of a questionnaire. The list of questions was prepared and reviewed in a few cycles. The questions were simple but required some technical knowledge about schools’ facilities. Most of the questions were closed-ended. The questionnaire was first tested not only by project partners but also by some of the collaborating high school teachers.
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 to join the surveys and future pilots. Following these meetings, the representatives were contacted by e-mail and provided access to online questionnaires built using Google Forms. The relevant connectivity and policy questions were addressed to the schools’ principals or appointed technical managers.
29 schools responded to the schools' connectivity and policies surveys (the questionnaires were answered by a single technical representative of each of these schools) from 6 different countries (Greece, Hungary, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, and Spain). Given the project’s assumptions on the number of schools joining initial pilots, these results were found to be representative of the whole population of initial pilot schools.
The results of the Up2U schools’ surveys are presented and summarised in this section.
The survey results provide information about the environment of the schools that are most likely to be engaged in the Up2U ecosystem. Before running with the planned MVP methodology (i.e. “Minimum Viable Product”, see Section 2.1 of Deliverable 4.1), it was necessary to learn how to fit the initial viable product, i.e. a first version of the Up2U toolbox, to its first users’ needs. Therefore, these results will inform the direction of further work within both WP3 and relevant tasks of WP4 and WP7 respectively in the areas of tools development and pilots setup preparation.
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, and are summarised in the following sections.
2.1 Bandwidth and
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Connection
More than half (55%) of the schools who responded
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to the survey access
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the Internet thanks to NRENs.
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Bandwidth of at least 80 Mb/s is present in
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41% of schools for downstream and
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31% of schools for upstream.
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2.2 Internal
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Network Arrangement
Most of the initial pilot schools have an internal wired network in all (52%) or some (28%) classrooms. WiFi coverage is very high
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– 65% of schools who responded
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to the survey
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have 100% coverage in classrooms.
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Finally, only 7% of schools
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declared that there is no WiFi at the school at all.
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2.3 Security and
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Policies
Hardware firewalls, as well as UTM (Unified Threat Management) devices, are present in many of the initial pilot schools, although in a significant amount of answers school principals were not sure about the availability of these solutions at their schools. In all the
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schools with a UTM device
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, the most important features
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, such as the spam filter, antivirus filter
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and content filter, were turned on.
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It is interesting to observe that only 1 of the 19 schools who responded to the question concerning
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a bring your own device (BYOD) policy
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does not allow students to use
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mobile devices at school, but it is willing to change the policy if there is a good reason.
3. Network
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Services Requirements
One of the purposes of this document is
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to analyse how the ecosystem services can be
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speeded up, or improved in terms of
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availability, with the GÉANT network services. To this end, in the following sections, we
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describe the characteristics of the network services
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in the GÉANT service portfolio, and outline the different
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types of services to be provided within the Up2U ecosystem, especially
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in relation to the Content Delivery Network concept
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, which strongly depends on
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underlying network connectivity.
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We then present suggestions on how to leverage the network services for the purposes of the ecosystem, and
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consider network peering requirements.
In the following paragraphs, by
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“ecosystem services” we mean the services and applications of the Up2U Application Toolbox to be delivered to users by the project, as described in Section 3.2, and by
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“network services” we mean the lower-
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level Internet connectivity services, outlined in Section 3.1.
3.1. GÉANT
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Portfolio of
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Network Services
The GÉANT pan-European backbone network offers outstanding service availability and service quality for R&E projects and entities. The network services most relevant to the Up2U ecosystem are:
- GÉANT IP
- GÉANT Plus
- GÉANT Lambda
- GÉANT MD-VPN
- GÉANT L3-VPN
- GÉANT Bandwidth on Demand
Each of these is described below.
GÉANT IP is an IP backbone network providing high-bandwidth connectivity between millions of users through National Research and Education Networks (NRENs). The GÉANT IP service supports both IPv4 and IPv6 natively using a dual stack routing structure. By default, there is no bandwidth or performance guarantee between any communicating pair of addresses. It has been designed to provide general-purpose IP transit services between participating NRENs and other approved research and education partners. Thus, the communication between two hosts is transited over
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GÉANT IP if the hosts are connected by an NREN or other such R&E provider.
More
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specialised network services are provided by GÉANT and its partners over the base backbone network and NRENs.
GÉANT Plus allows NRENs to request point-to-point Ethernet circuits between end
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points at GÉANT
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Points of Presence (PoPs). GÉANT Plus is built on a common infrastructure, but appears to its private users to be dedicated to that
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user’s needs. The capacity of these circuits can be between 100 Mbps and 10 Gbps and potentially up to tens of Gigabits per second.
GÉANT Lambda provides transparent 10 Gbps or 100 Gbps wavelengths between GÉANT PoPs. It improves a point-to-point communication
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based on a new physical connection that must be first requested and installed.
GÉANT Multi-Domain Virtual Private Network (MD-VPN) is designed to increase privacy and control over data transfers. MD-VPN enables end
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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
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GÉANT IP, giving not only assured performance but also security of the transferred data.
GÉANT Bandwidth on Demand (BoD) is a point-to-point connectivity service for data transport that allows
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bandwidth between the end points to be reserved on demand. The data transport capacity dedicated to a connection can range from 1 Mbps up to 10 Gbps.
It is important to say that all these specialised network services are supported by a range of network monitoring, security and support services aimed at optimising the network performance. These services work to provide seamless access to the infrastructure and enhanced monitoring to identify and remedy any incidents that disrupt the data flow and to eliminate attempts to disrupt service by maintaining high levels of network security.
3.2. Overview of the
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Ecosystem Services
One of the aims of the Up2U project is to provide an innovative ecosystem of Internet services that support learning based on formal and informal learning scenarios. The project
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follows the
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“minimum viable product” approach to development, i.e.
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quickly
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delivering prototypes to end
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users,
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evaluating them, and
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deciding on
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further development directions. Thus, the service ecosystem
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will evolve during the lifetime of the project. However, at this stage we can indicate some of the services or
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types of services that are planned for the initial iterations of the continuous service improvement process. This is based on plans provided by the relevant teams of WP4, WP5, and other tasks of WP3 in terms of the tools and services they expect to integrate into Up2U.
The ecosystem services we currently plan to provide are:
- file-based sync and share ,
- open access to rich digital multimedia content from federated learning object repositories ,
- real-time communication like
- such as WebRTC-protocol-based one-to-one tutoring application ,
- recording &
- and authoring apps ,
- Learning Management System (LMS), group management ,
- e-notebooks, collaborative work, social apps ,
- assessment of interactive learning paths supported by learning analytics, learning record store.
During the project lifetime, all the ecosystem services are going to be hosted at the infrastructure provided by some of the project partners: GRNET (Greece), PSNC (Poland), GWGD (Germany)
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and CERN (Switzerland). Up2U is also going
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to develop business plans and investigate appropriate business models to ensure the ecosystem
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is sustainable after the end of the project and
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can be easily deployed at another, possibly commercial, infrastructure.
3.3. Content Delivery Network
3.3.1. The
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Concept
The idea of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) is to distribute
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services spatially relative to end
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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.
Image source: www.cdnreviews.com
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
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original server is needed. Otherwise, the edge server first fetches
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the content from the
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original server, and the first user requesting this particular piece of data waits for the response a little bit longer.
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Using a CDN offers various benefits. From the end-user perspective, it
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provides an
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improved quality of
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experience: data download time and latency are reduced, and availability of the service is improved (if
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the desired data is available in an edge server, then
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any downtime of the
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original server does not prevent users
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from accessing the data). From the network perspective, a CDN provides better network performance: the number of hops during the data transfers is reduced, the possibility of bandwidth saturation is lowered, and
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traffic in the backbone network is also reduced. From the content provider perspective, a CDN
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results in lower costs
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, as there is less network load and a reduced possibility of service downtime.
3.3.2. Implementation for the
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Project
As part of the Up2U ecosystem, the project is going to provide the eduOER Metadata Repository, which is a platform for aggregating and providing a federation of learning object metadata. The metadata is gathered from various learning object providers (content repositories) or other metadata federations. The eduOER
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Metadata Repository will be the main learning object feeder to the Up2U LMS and other future Up2U services.
We have
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gathered
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an initial set of content provider repositories, which are physically based on some infrastructures in the pilot countries but also in other
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European countries and even in America. The physical
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locations of the origin content repository and of the end
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users have an impact on access time, latency
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and availability of the data for the users. The metadata of learning objects is going to be read by other ecosystem services from the eduOER
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Repository, but the actual object content is going to be fetched from a particular federated object repository. The latter process is where the CDN concept could be leveraged.
It could be
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beneficial to build a CDN
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that handles users’ requests for content from content repositories. Accessing large multimedia objects physically located in one country by a user
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in another country far away will result
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in the drawbacks outlined
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above, for instance, longer download times, larger latencies,
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greater network load, and
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increased possibility of service downtime. Consider the case
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that 20 students from Portugal are running the same video, physically located in a content repository in Greece, during a class. The large
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video file must be transferred through the backbone network 20 times
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– the same data is sent across Europe 20 times
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and all
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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
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19 of the students would be served more quickly with the cached copy. Note that the benefits scale with the number of students, classrooms
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and pilot schools
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– without a CDN, all requests for such a
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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
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investigating a prototype
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CDN with edge servers located in London, Poznan and Athens. The
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preliminary tests
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confirm that the physical locations of a client and a server strongly influence the data transfer times
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and, as a result, the network load too. More tests will be conducted with the first content repositories federated with eduOER.
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We will also analyse how to implement the CDN
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to ensure it is easy to add new edge servers and new repositories in the future.
3.4.
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Conclusions on
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Network Services
First of all, it must be noted that the GÉANT network services can support data transfers that are sent over
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GÉANT IP, i.e. between end
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points connected by NRENs or selected R&E partners. The whole communication between an ecosystem service hosted at an NREN and a school connected by another NREN will be transferred through
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GÉANT IP by default, and no further work is needed. However, we cannot influence routing between a host connected, for instance, by a commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP), and thus we cannot do much to support such data communications.
As presented in Section
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2, some schools invited to the Up2U pilot are connected by NRENs and some are not. Moreover, the
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always-on education concept assumes that young users gain access to all the work or learning applications and data anywhere, at any time and from any device they choose. Thus, we
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will also consider usage of the ecosystem services
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from students’ homes or by mobile networks. In such cases,
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GÉANT IP will not be used for transit.
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In addition, we cannot focus only on NREN-connected users
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because of the sustainability
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perspective, i.e. because we need to engage commercial entities to support the ecosystem infrastructure after the lifetime of the project.
The point-to-point network services (GÉANT Plus and GÉANT Lambda) cannot support communication paths between end
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users and the ecosystem services, and also between two end
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users (e.g. for WebRTC tutoring sessions), because of the multiplicity of the end
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points and because the set of
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end
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points taking part in communication will dynamically change. However, the point-to-point network services can be applied for static connections between some end
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points that host the ecosystem, and are physically distributed among different locations. Such end
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points could be an end-user service hosted in one
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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
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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
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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 then be
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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 the 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
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low cost to quickly manage changes: adding or removing edge servers or repositories. In this case, data isolation across
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GÉANT IP and even an allocated bandwidth could be ensured.
If we choose MD-VPN, as the simpler VPN solution without bandwidth allocation, to support the CDN, we shall consider
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manually
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using GÉANT BoD when larger data transfers between
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certain points in the CDN are expected. Such a common case could be adding new edge servers or repositories to the CDN. A new “empty” edge server can be “warmed up”, i.e. forced to fill up the cache with large amounts of data from the origin servers, to improve quality of experience for users who first request the cache for particular multimedia objects.
3.5. Network
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Peering Requirements
Network peering is an interconnection of separate Internet networks that have a physical interconnection and freely exchange routing information in order to exchange traffic between the computers of each network. Peering is distinct from transit, in which an end user or network operator pays another, usually larger, network operator to carry all their traffic for them.
The main motivation for peering is reduced cost of data transport, but there are also
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others: increased redundancy on communication paths, increased capacity by distributing traffic across many networks, and increased control over traffic.
The physical infrastructure, which is underneath the Up2U ecosystem, consists of the pan-European GÉANT backbone network for research and education and the public and private cloud platforms. The GÉANT Peering service ensures the cost-effective network traffic exchange between commercial clouds (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc.) and the R&E community. GÉANT also connects all NRENs and big research centres (CERN, ESA, EMBL, SKA, etc.) in Europe and their private cloud platforms. Via the NRENs and their regional and metropolitan network peers, about 15,000 primary and 10,000 secondary schools are connected to the same pan-European network infrastructure.
The GÉANT backbone network obviously focuses on connections with the R&E networks more than on peering with commercial providers. Considering the Alwaysalways-on education concept promoted by Up2U and the necessary accessibility of the ecosystem from any network and device, we should monitor users' users’ types of Internet connections during the project lifetime. Depending on the future scale and the load generated by commercial ISP users, one could decide about required changes to GÉANT decisions can be made about whether to change GÉANT’s network peering policy to extend peering with commercial providers.
Appendix A:
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eduroam near
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Schools
Appendix II: Connectivity in the School Sector - GÉANT Study: eduroam near Schools – Details
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- How is your school connected to the Internet?
- via NREN
- via a commercial provider
- other (please specify)
- Please indicate the total internet bandwidth in your school for downloading
- Less than 5 Mb / s
- Up to 10 Mb / s
- Up to 20 Mb / s
- Up to 40 Mb / s
- Up to 80 Mb / s
- Up to 160 Mb / s
- Over 160 Mb / s
- Please indicate the total internet bandwidth in your school for uploading
- Less than 5 Mb / s
- Up to 10 Mb / s
- Up to 20 Mb / s
- Up to 40 Mb / s
- Up to 80 Mb / s
- Up to 160 Mb / s
- Above 160 Mb / s
- What is the arrangement of the internal cable network (Ethernet) in your school
- The school does not have a cable network
- The school has a link cable only in some rooms are not being used in the classroom
- The school has a link cable in some classrooms
- The school has a cable connection in all classrooms
- Do you have WiFi network at your school?
- Yes, and it's freely accesible for students in all classes
- Yes, but it isn't freely accesible for students in all classes
- No
- What is the coverage of the WiFi network in your school?
- 100% of the school
- 100% of the classrooms, but not 100% of the school
- other (please specify)
- Is eduroam available at your school?
- Yes
- No
- Is eduroam available at other locations, either near your school or that are usually visited by your students?
- Yes
- No
- Which are these locations?
- Public library
- Private library
- Youth centers
- other (please specify)
- Are your students able to authenticate to eduroam?
- Yes
- No
- How? (please specify)
- Can students connect their private devices to the Internet at school:
- During the lessons in the manner specified by the teacher
- Besides school classes to a limited extent (eg. Only to have access to local educational materials)
- Besides school classes in any way
- Is your school using an hardware firewall?
- Yes
- No
- I don’t know
- Is your school using a UTM device (Unified threat management) - a multi-firewall?
- Yes
- No
- I don’t know
- Which are the functions of your UTM?
- spam filter: Yes – No – I don’t know
- anti-virus filter: Yes – No – I don’t know
- intrusion detection: Yes – No – I don’t know
- content filtering: Yes – No – I don’t know
- 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