Dr Kilnam Chon, Chair, APTLD and APAN,Profile of ... - Connect-World

company logoProfile of the Asia Pacific Advanced Network (APAN)Dr Kilnam Chon, Chair, APTLD and APANArticleAbstractIntroduction The Internet started around thirty years ago as an experimentalnetwork project called Arpanet. It has been through the research and developmentexperiment phase, the research and development production phase, the transitionphase and is currently in its commercialisation phase.The second generation Internet development started with various experiments ongigabit testbeds around the world in the 1980s and 1990s but it is now moving intothe research and development production phase. The first generation with besteffort service does not guarantee the quality of service, whereas the secondgeneration guarantees the quality of service. The quality of the service isparticularly important to multimedia communications such as video and sound.Examples of the second generation Internet in North America are Internet 2 withvBNS and Abilene, and CA*net 2. TEN-155 was deployed to cover much ofEurope, and various national high performance research networks have beendeployed. In Asia, various gigabit testbeds have been developed among manycountries and regions including Australia, China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia,Singapore, Taiwan, and Thailand.Asia-Pacific Advanced Network Consortium (APAN) was formed in 1997 tointerconnect national and regional testbeds as well as other high performancenetworks in order to offer global interconnectivity to the production networkservice for the research and development community of the Asia -Pacific region.APAN will offer the network environment for the Asia-Pacific research communityas well as the testbed needed to carry out research and development on highperformance networks. APAN operates various working groups and committees tomanage its mission. There are also a number of network operation centres,engineering teams and secretariats under APAN management. See Table 2 as well

as APAN web site for further information.The current APAN network topology can be found in Figure 1. It consists ofvarious inter-continental links. The primary inter-continental link is between theAPAN exchange points in Tokyo (XP-Tokyo) and STAR TAP in Chicago with anadditional inter-continental link between XP-Singapore and STAR TAP. Moreinter-continental links are coming up across the Pacific and Eurasia Continent.Their bandwidth ranges from between 14 and 73 Mbps and there are now plans todevelop an inter-continental bandwidth of 155 Mbps this year. The intracontinentallinks are typically between 2 Mbps and 8 Mbps.We originally planned the inter-continental backbone of 45 Mbps or more , but thishas to be postponed to the next phase due to lack of traffic and funding. Otherwise,we are covering all major countries and regions in Asia who need to be linked with1.5 Mbps or more for (high performance) research and education traffic.Global links are initially handled in STAR TAP in Chicago, where Canadian highperformance research network, CA* net 2, and various European high performanceresearch networks such as TEN-155 could be reached. The direct link from Asia toEurope is now being planned . [27] Since there are no efficient broadband linkssuch as the one through Siberia, it is very likely that we have to exchange packetswith Europe through North America for the time being.We have APAN hubs, called exchange points (XP) in Soul, Singapore and Tokyofor packet exchange and other purposes. Its primary function is to exchange ATMcells through a permanent virtual path and circuit (PVP/PVC). In addition, XProutes IP packets, and converts the IP packets and the ATM cells. Each XP hasvarious servers for network operation and applications. Examples are the routeserver for network operation, and cache and Mbone servers for networkapplications.Interoperability with STAR TAP in Chicago and other exchange points of differentcontinents are very important to form globally interoperable research networks. Weexpect some of APANs exchange points to be the continental exchange points forAsia to peer with other continental exchange points in America and Europe.In addition to XPs, each APAN member network operates various access points,called APs to handle APAN access as well as domestic exchange. Some of the XPsand APS are expanded to evolve to become GigaPoPs.Network OperationAPAN network operation consists of two levels. At APAN level, we have theAPAN Network Operation Centres in Australia, Japan, Korea, and Singapore to run

its domestic network or co-ordinate its domestic networks in the case of Japan. TheAPAN Network Operation Center in Japan operates various international links.One of them is TransPac, the primary Trans-Pacific link, which is jointly operatedwith the USA counterpart. At the APAN member network level, APAN NetworkOperation Center co-ordinates various APAN member networks.All Network Operation Centres are operated for 7 days a week and 24 hours a day.We recently added Engineering Teams to enhance the Network Operation Centresin the areas of Ipv6, measurement, multicast and quality of service, called Qbone.Technology Area The following technology working groups (WGs) handletechnology issues; CacheIpv6MulticastMeasurementMultimediaNetwork DesignQuality of ServiceSatellite InternetSecurityTelevisionCache WG is to co-ordinate cache systems among APAN member networks.APAN participates to the global cache hierarchy system development withcounterparts in North America, and Europe. [25] In addition the cache systems insome countries including Japan serves other member networks such as A13members as the parent cache. Ipv6 WG of APAN investigates to test its usabilityfor global high performance research networks. Initially, the Ipv6 test network wasdeveloped in APAN with interconnection to other similar networks including theIpv6 network of Internet 2. Measurement is one of the most important projects ofAPAN. We need to measure on delay* throughput for long distance such as theTrans-Pacific link and the Asia-Europe link. We need to find out actual levels ofperformance on delay as well as throughput so that we can make an assessmentbased on real-time applications , broadband applications and others. We plan tocollaborate with similar effort in other continents. Specifically, we are developingthe virtual measurement networks with 0C3MON, Skitter, and Surveyor. [33,34,35]Multicst with Mbone is one of the major utilities in APAN apart from the technicalinfrastructure. We provide high quality Mbone with minimal packet loss toguarantee high quality. In addition, we offer multicast infrastructure in APAN,which is migrating toward MBGP-based multicast starting from Tokyo-XP.Multimedia WG is focusing on various multimedia support tools includingmultimedia conferencing systems and documentation tools at this moment. Virtualreality technology is also included here. The group is currently evaluating severalmultimedia conferencing systems to be used in APAN . Network Design WG

concentrated on APAN network design and analysis initially, and its major workhas now been completed Satellite Internet WG is looking into inclusion of satellitein APAN networks. A13 is the first effort with hubs in Japan and several sites inAsia. [36] It is expanding the coverage to include the Indian Ocean and number ofother sites. Currently, the group is looking to add another hub in Singapore withlinks to Malaysia and Indonesia. Security is always an important issue in anynetwork. We plan to deploy necessary security measure on our network, and carryon our research into the area of security. A new group currently focussing ontelevision and video traffic in APAN such as Digital Video at 45 MPEG 2 at 6-8Mbps and MPEG 1 at 1.5-2 Mbps. The group is expected to collaborate with thecounterparts in Internet 2 in USA as well as CA* net 2 in Canada. User CommunityArea Network usage is co-ordinated with the following Working Group under UserCommunity Area;Agriculture WG BioInformatics WG Digital Library WG Education WG Grid WGMedical Informatics WG Monitoring WG Manufacturing WGMost of user communities of APAN are in science and engineering now.? We planto expand to cover research activities in social science and humanity. Allapplications need to reserve the necessary bandwidth through a ResourceAllocation Committee. Some applications need to reserve the bandwidth inmultiple networks such as APAN and vBNS, or APAN and CA* net2. We will tryto arrange so that such reservations are easy to make. See APAN home page, http://www.apan.net for APAN applications in addition to other information. Inter-Continental Collaboration Inter-continental collaboration is one of the mainobjectives of APAN along intra-continental collaboration. APAN collaborates withvarious regional and national high performance research networks such as the onesin North America and Europe. At present many research networks around the worldhave links to STAR TAP in Chicago and other exchange points in North America .They provide either Layer 2 link (ATM cell) or Layer 3 link (IP packet). Theseengineered interconnections are particularly important to high performanceapplications, which tend to require high performance quality of serviceconnections. Various collaborations efforts are being made globally. Some ofglobal policy collaborations are: Global Interoperability of Broadband Networks(GIBN) Co-ordinated Committee for Intercontinental Research Networking(CCIRN) Some of the technologies are co-ordinated globally in the followingareas;CacheIpv6MeasurementsMulticast including MboneNetwork StorageQuality of Service

SecurityTelevisionApplications are usually co-ordinated by specific user communities; globally orregionally Concluding Remarks The idea to create APAN came about during theAPEC Symposium in Tsukuba, March 1996. Professor M. McRobbie and theauthor proposed a high performance research network for the Asia-Pacific regionwith inter-continental links. During the evenings of the Symposium, thesymposium participants got together to polish up the idea. APAN was proposedduring a series of monthly meetings in the spring and summer of 1996. APANConsortium was formed in June 1996 with four founding member countries;Australia, Japan, Korea, and Singapore, and two liaison member countries; Canadaand USA. We originally planned the Asian Backbone with 45 Mbps or more aswell as the inter-continental link with 45 Mbps or more. The Asian backbone hasnot been realised due to lack of funding and problems related to the pricingstructure which favours direct links to USA. We need to develop the Asianbackbone in the next phases to promote intra-continental collaboration.ConclusionDomestic infrastructures, ie., domestic high performance research networks are notquite ready in many countries. Thus, we are being forced to develop the necessarydomestic infrastructure at the same time. This is a typical catch-up game in Asia.Industry participation is initially minimal, and we need to make an effort so that theAPAN initiative is attractive to the industry including the service industry andmanufacturing industry as well as the public sectors. We need to come up withmany attractive applications with intra-continental collaborations and/or intercontinentalcollaboration. This is also new to us, at least at this level of intensity.We believe that we have to go through much learning with trial and error before wecan come up with new attractive applications. Looking into future, the firstquestion is the same as the one the author raised in 1996 when APAN was initiallydiscussed. ; Why not gigabit We hope we can realise the gigabit Asian backbonewith the gigabit inter-continental link early in the next decade as soon as othercontinents are ready with their gigabit networks.HomeMagazine Contact UsCareers Tell a FriendSiteMap©Copyright World Info Comms Ltd.