The EARNEST study was a recent activity within the European GN2 project that investigated the evolution of research and education networking in the coming years. It looked into technical, organisational and economic aspects, as well as user requirements, and issues related to geographic disparities and on the campus. The aim is to help the planning of future networks, and provide inputs to policy making at local, national and European levels.

This talk will primarily focus on the findings and recommendations of the Technical Sub-Study, and will outline forthcoming developments in transmission technologies, control plane and routing technologies, network virtualisation, operations and performance, and middleware. The findings have been formulated through extensive consultation with leading-edge vendors, developers and researchers, with specific reference to those technologies that are likely to be of most interest to research and education networks.

Bio: Kevin Meynell is a Project Development Officer at TERENA, the European Association of NRENs. He was the editor of the EARNEST Technical Sub-Study, and is currently involved with the FEDERICA and GLIF initiatives.

After graduating from Middlesex Polytechnic in 1991, Kevin Meynell joined the JET Project, an experimental nuclear fusion programme. He moved to UKERNA (now JANET(UK)) in 1995, before joining TERENA in 1997. He also spent a short period working on domain name issues with  CENTR. 

The research and education communities across the world have witnessed a new paradigm of internetworking in past few decades, i.e. Research & Education Networks (RENs) and their interconnectivity. These RENs are aimed to provide two fold functionality that are, a network for collaborative research and at the same time a network to research on, for future Internet & its application. At present such RENs are all across the world, in each continent and almost in every country. Amongst are the Internet2 of USA comprised of various State and Agency based networks. CA*Net (CANARIE) of Canada is a network of Provincial networks. Similarly GEANT2 is a network of National RENs of European countries and APAN is a similar network of Asia-pacific countries. These regional networks and some others as well, have direct connectivity to each other forming the global research and education network dedicated for the R&E community across the world.

Pakistan Education & Research Network (PERN), the only national R&E network of Pakistan is being managed by the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan. Though, the network was established a while ago and so far eighty five (85) have been connected to it, but there has been disparity in linking the network to other such international networks through dedicated R&E links. Realizing this deficiency and the importance of having this network linkage, the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan and the National Science Foundation of USA have decided to equally co-fund a dedicated link from PERN to Internet2. This dedicated R&E network link is being established from Karachi (Pakistan) to the TEIN2 PoP in Singapore. TEIN2 and our colleagues from Japan will provide transit from the TEIN2 PoP in Singapore to the TransPac node in Japan, and from there TranPac will provide transit to the Pacific Wave exchange to finally take the circuit terminating to Internet2. This is one of the first examples of genuine funding/resource commitment for global networking from the Asian, the US and the European research funding agencies and may well represent a new dawn in global connectivity efforts. The presentation will highlight the efforts made and steps taken to make this happen and some of the application areas that will use the new international connectivity.

The US Federal Plan for Advanced Networking Research and Development document was developed to provide guidance to US Government Federal agency networking programs on networking research priorities over the next 7-8 years. The final (pre-print) version has been released as of June 11. Â An overview of the plan's major recommendations will be given.

Bio: Heather Boyles is Director of International Relations for Internet2®, a project of more than 200 U.S. universities working with industry and government, to develop and deploy high-performance networks, applications and advanced technologies for the U.S. research and higher education communities. Heather has been with Internet2 since its inception in 1996. She has senior management responsibilities for establishing and maintaining Internet2's relationships with non-US national, international and governmental organizations involved in high-performance networking for research and education.

One of the work programs of the extension of the Trans Eurasia Information Network (to TEIN3) is a study to determine feasibility of extending the TEIN3 footprint to cover countries in South Asia.  Bangladesh, India, Nepa;, Pakistan and Sri Lanka are currently participating in the study.  A progress report will be provided.

Bio: George McLaughlin has been engaged by DANTE to coordinate the TEIN3 South Asia Feasibility Study