High Performance Large Scale Networks

Recently, IIT Madras, Tokyo University, Keio University, and VOICE&DATA organized a workshop on Large Scale Networks at IIT Madras Research Park, Chennai. The topic of the seminar was 'Building and Operation of High Performance and Large Scale Networks in India'.

In his welcome speech, IIT Madras Prof David Koilpillai said, “Cultural exchanges between India and Japan began in the early 6th century with the introduction of Buddhism to Japan from India. Japan established its diplomatic relations on April 28, 1952, and from then Japan and India truly share long standing historical and close bound friendship. So, the workshop is truly a milestone of the Indo-Japan cooperative research and bring together experts with complementary strengths. There are different cultures and different ways of approaching excellence and innovation and we have a single goal towards it.”

We have a technical program presented by distinguished experts and we have engaging panel discussion which will cover topics from challenges in large scale network design, evolution, and challenges of India and Japan large-scale IP networks and building and operating large-scale networks in India.

As part of this work we also showcase the IP network equipment system which addresses the challenges, balances high performances which energy efficiency.”

Prof Bhaskar Ramamurthi, director, IIT Madras was the chief guest for the event. He spoke on how mobile telephone network has grown rapidly and is at par with China and that we are also poised to show a similar growth in broadband.

He spoke about NKN network connecting academic institutes and other continents and how, at the same time, the government is planning to take fiber into every panchayat and village in the country. Another big development is acceptance of tablets in the Indian market and make it possible for them to access information to access online teaching. There is a great demand for education but there is a shortage of teachers and infrastructure.

The consul general of Japan, Masanori Nakano spoke how the workshop on network technologies has a special significance to both India and Japan in enhancing cooperation of collaboration between 2 countries to develop mutual understanding in the field of information technology networks. The objective of this workshop is to share experiences, best practices, and social safety.

In his video address, Prof Jun Murai, Keio University talked about how India and Japan have been working together on high-speed network. Digital network is very important for the infrastructure of the country and information societies will contribute to economics, education, and healthcare.

Prof SV Raghavan, chief architect and chairman, Technical Advisory Committee of National Knowledge Network spoke about 'Challenges in Large Scale Network Design'. He said that when we design a network for pan-India, we only worry about social acceptance as application is going to determine faster social acceptance.

“In case of NKN, we had 1,500 points of presence whereas in case of NOFN it is 250,000 gram panchayats. Evolving of standard operating procedures across the hundreds and thousands of autonomous entity is a big challenge.

Whenever you do it in a country like India you need to look at the infrastructure available in the country and you need to have a strategy to use the capacity available in the nation. So we use a 3-prompt approach by utilizing appropriate talent wherever technology and innovations are available and try to put it to use, and then stimulate latent talents,” he added.

Prof Hiroshi Esaki, University of Tokyo, Japan spoke about 'Role of Academic Networks in Japanese Internet & Issues'. “The first is the WIDE project. We have some level of independence from the government. We have contributed to the government policy making. We are happy to connect India at very high speed with Japan and North America. All this will help in undertaking real-time research thereby helping in development of the society. There are many researchers who focus on demonstrations and use other systems. Focus is also on real integration of component technologies with the existing large scale networks. The internet has always been a testbed. We are working towards internet of things and we have several research activity connecting to the things for human beings,” he revealed.

So, what is the role of academic professional testbed? It is a vehicle to explore established verification and evaluation of technology, its integration of component technologies and operational technologies, education of engineers and global collaboration. In order to make this we have a huge progression in the industry and academies and also based on that experience evidence we are providing new policy to the government to be global and based on advance technologies.

The first panel discussion focused on 'Evolution & Challenges of India & Japan in Large Scale IP Networks'. The panelists where Prof SV Raghavan, Prof Hiroshi Esaki, Takehisa Hayashi, Prof Ashok Jhunjhunwala, IIT Madras, and Prof Osamu Nakamura.

Prof Ashok Jhunjhunwala said that India for few years has made a huge difference in terms of videoconferencing particularly between institutions and therefore delivery of lectures from one institute to another. This has really started to make an impact and larger plans of how to leverage networks of this kind to contribute significantly to education. For eg, in India there are large number of students, large number of colleges but teachers in many of these colleges are not of high quality.

The second major initiative that has taken place by government of India is to try to connect again every village in India through optic fiber network. Now, these two together basically set the stage in addition to the existing commercial network of connecting optical fiber throughout the country and provide the basic network on which IP traffic will flow. The access is not strong in India. For eg, 3G exists but it is only in urban areas whereas 4G have not yet started.

Presently, India is looking more towards Europe and the United States but we need to strengthen our tie-up with Japan which will make a huge difference to both the countries.

Prof SV Raghavan said the National Knowledge Network and the National Optical Fiber Network are two complementary efforts of the government of India. The NKN brings all the higher education institutions and laboratories of higher science together-nearly about 1,500 of them. So the education system and knowledge creation system is well needed together by the NKN.

Together it is about `28,000 crore investment. There is a complementary investment in preparing an academic system called National Mission Education through ICT by MHRD that is around `6,000 crore. Together this effort forms something like `34,000 crore to be invested by the government.

Takehisa Hayashi, CTO, Alaxala Networks talked about regulation changes based on IT experience. “The governance of healthcare can be changed based on the ICT technologies. Basically existing healthcare or medical system designed from the viewpoint of doctors can be focused on providing patient care.

We are really moving to best education and best professional expert. And they are going to share with students and engineers interactive communication and discussion using large scale network. So what would be the next stage, improvement of innovations by using remote cooperation's using high performance networks,” he said.

Prof Osamu Nakamura said, “We need innovations to creatively transform our society. So I have a question first, how to make good innovations using a NKN testbed? I want to make a testbed with investment in Keio University. NKN can be extended to Europe and Singapore and that could be possible through Japan. We look at weather forecasting across the world as world maps are being shared along with weather information through a large-scale network.”

Takehisa Hayashi, CTO, Alaxala Networks, spoke on 'Challenges Toward Future Network Infrastructure'. He spoke on Japanese networking experience with respect to expansion challenges which talks about capability, quality of service, and security. Next Generation Network (NGN) in Japan supports 30 mn subscribers today and the infrastructure supports advance broadband service and its FTTH network.

Prof Abhay Karandikar, IIT Bombay spoke on 'Building Next Generation Mobile Backhaul Networks'. “Today we have 900 mn cellphone subscribers with a tele-density close to 75%. Fifteen years back getting a landline connection was a daunting task but now one can easily get a cellphone connection.

Interestingly, we have seen a negative growth rate in the wired subscriber base and people are switching to mobile telephony. However the scenario in the broadband is relatively bleak. Wireless internet subscribers are around 380 mn and most of them are GPRS connections. In India, the potential of providing broadband connectivity using 4G technology is very promising given the fact that we have a big market to tap in terms of the broadband connections.”

As the deployment and the usage of the smartphone started in India essentially the need of bandwidth over the wireless network has started increasing. Today the 3G network can provide only 100 Kbps per second as a sustained average throughput and therefore there is clearly a need to go and provide higher throughput over the wireless networks.

One of the drivers for the broadband internet is basically the mobile video that today constitute 70% of the mobile traffic growth and therefore it is the most bandwidth hungry application which requires very large sustained throughput from the networks.

On the other hand, the data traffic is increasing significantly and that is actually a problem for the operator because the challenges that are involved in installing these large scale packet core networks are not giving those return that an operator expects.

Dr Keiji Takeda, Keio University spoke on 'New Application of Network and its Issues in Cloud Network Era'. “In the case of natural disaster in the shape of earthquake and tsunami, we have fully utilized the cloud computing and the vast network technology to mitigate the damage and recover from the situation. Right after the earthquake the public transport was down because of large traffic jams and people were not able to go back home for days. So various IT applications on IP network were utilized.

Then due to the trouble in the nuclear power plant we were not able to supply the electricity to the cities for days. So the electricity company decided to go for scheduled power black out in various city areas at different timings, so as to manage the scarce power supply.

When the company announced the information that this particular area is going to be a black out area at this particular time, people cannot access the information. So we have to make the information in such a way that they can access that in a proper manner. So to distribute the information to the people we have utilized cloud computing.

The participants for panel discussion on wireless access to cloud services and cyber-physical system: Performance, security, application included Prof K Sivalingam, Prof Keiji Takeda, Masaaki Yoshimura, and Babu Narayanan.

Babu Narayanan spoke on cloud being the next step in the revolution of internet and if you look at it from the Indian context then broadband wireless is almost next big access mechanism. In the next evolution of this connectivity we expect several hundred million people experiencing high broadband connectivity and that would be the time when cloud and wireless will flourish. Specifically in India it's very important to have wireless because some of the statistics suggest that a majority of services will happen through wireless not through wireline.

Prof K Sivalingam spoke on Hawaii Framework where they provide users with access to cloud services and also an API to access those services. Some of the services that Microsoft cloud offers is OCR services, so if a person is traveling and saw a particular sign or symbol which he wants to inquire, in this case he can take a picture of that and send it across to the Microsoft OCR services that will scan it, extract the text, do the translation, and give you back with all the related details.

K Ananth Krishnan, vice president and CTO, Tata Consultancy Services spoke on 'Building and Operating Large Scale Networks in India: A Viewpoint on the Opportunities and Challenges'. He said, “In TCS we run 60,000 virtual desktops and therefore the ability of everyone in the value chain becomes the new challenge to figure out how to manage the whole shift to cloud.

From the enterprise prospective, if we take the example of TCS, we have deployed a corporate wide social network and we call it Know Me. Every Know Me function will become available in all kinds of mobile devices. We have also invested a lot on BYOD policy which we have deployed and therefore we expect to gain on our employee performance.

We have 5 global technology trends today, ie, expectation of digital experience in terms of conversion into an IT based system, social computing, mobility, big data, and cloud computing. We are also working on quality of experience in a way which is interesting in technology and economically.

About the network, K Ananth Krishnan said that one cannot provide a single downtime irrespective of whatever bandwidth you are providing. Knowing the fact that we do not know what the conditions would be, designing a system which can provide the best of bandwidth to the people is not easy.

Dr Kumar Sivarajan, CTO, Tejas Networks spoke on “Challenges of Building Large Optical Transport Network.” He said that we build network on fibers which eventually connects homes, cell towers, offices together but big emphasis is on very low cost. Optical transport is the road of transport, the main job is to build pipes for mobile backhaul.

Some of the constraints specifically related to India is that the entire network is optimized for voice and it is not easy to roll out data on the same network added Sivarajan.

The participants for the panel discussion on 'Building and operating of large-scale networks in India: Need analysis planning and design technology selection device configuration and migration to IPv6' included: Dr Gaurav Raina, department of Electrical Engg, IIT Madras; Dr Kumar Sivarajan, CTO, Tejas Network; Prof Osamu Nakamura; and Prof Abhay Karandikar.