Conference Highlights

1. Conference Highlights David Williams TERENA Networking Conference Thursday 8 October 1998 David.O.Williams@cern.ch Slides: http://nicewww.cern.ch/~davidw/public/TERENA.ppt

2. Top level outline • Report on ICFA-NTF • Personal view of future • Summary

3. Acknowledgements • The ICFA-NTF report describes the work of 31 people from 21 different institutions (of which 8 universities) in 11 countries spread over three continents • The people who provide the networks which we use (inside institutions, regionally, nationally, internationally etc.) • The “real users” who took time to answer our questions and provide comments

4. Monitoring

5. Packet Loss (1/2) • Packets are discarded when the router buffers fill up and overflow • When packet flow from input link(s) exceeds the capacity of the output link(s) • Especially at ends of (expensive) transoceanic links • Packet loss rates (PLRs) are about the best approx-imation to what the end-user feels is the overall “quality” being provided by a link • But note that PLR measurements don’t tell the network engineer much about the nature and the location of any congestion that is present on a link (so not widely used by them).

6. Packet Loss (2/2) • Different applications stop working at different PLRs. E-mail “always” works. The more a session is interactive (telnet, X) or depends on delivery of many packets without much jitter (audio, video) the lower the acceptable PLR. • As a general rule of thumb:- <1% is excellent 1-2.5% is good 2.5-5% is ~OK 5-12% is poor >12% is unusable

7. The intercontinental issue

8. Quite detailed history is available by clicking on each entry

9. Daily packet loss structure on a congested route 8 quiet hours at night From ~01.00 to 09.00 CET 50% peaks Thurs Tue Fri Mon Wed Sat Sun Sun

10. Close to (national) perfection Most of the following data is for the seven day period 13-19 August 1998 Because most students are on holiday and there have been some recent capacity upgrades, there is less “daily” congestion than “normal” at the moment, especially on the transatlantic links. Things will probably start to get worse in September.

11. Fermi to SLAC No packet loss ~55 msec RTT ~2000 miles?

12. DESY to Dresden No packet loss 25-30 msec RTT, with bumps, a few to 100 msec ~500 km

13. Close to (international) perfection

14. CERN to NBI Copenhagen 13/3360 packets lost 60-90 msec RTT, with regular jitter ~1000 km

15. SLAC to KEK 1/3360 packets lost 180-250 msec, some jitter ~10,000 km

16. CERN to Osaka, standard dates 23/3360 packets lost 330-400 msec RTT. ~20,000 km (via USA)

17. Some problem cases National

18. CMU (Pittsburgh) to Cincinnati 10.37% packet loss over month of July 50-100 msec RTT, with heavy daily congestion 400 miles?? No data available for standard dates Sat Sun

19. More problem cases International

20. Fermi to Madrid Broken Classic congestion Monday

21. Longer term plots

22. Some longer term plots of difficult cases Period is normally 3 months up to 20 August National

23. Fermi to Brown (15 April to 25 August) ?? Packet loss 16.15% in April, 0.05% in July. They changed their ISP!!

24. CNAF Bologna to Perugia Packet loss only 3-4%, but RTT goes wild

25. Some longer term plots of difficult cases International

26. CMU to DESY Packet loss ~15%

27. CERN to ITEP Moscow (month of July) Packet loss only 3.44%, but RTT degrading

28. SLAC to IHEP Beijing Packet loss 15-20%

29. Monitoring - conclusions?

30. Monitoring conclusions • ESnet is an example to us all. It is well-configured and provides very good service between ESnet sites. • Many of the national nets in Europe and Japan also do a very good job. They are, however, not normally as well-configured as ESnet. • The problems come when you hit congestion. Normally caused by saturation, often on cross-ocean links. • You need “headroom”

31. Recommendations

32. Inter-continental links (1/3) • ICFA should encourage the provision of some considerable extra bandwidth for ICFA traffic, especially over the Atlantic • A workshop should be held a.s.a.p., preferably in October 1998. Would be best if someone “more global” takes the lead, but we cannot wait for ever... • Participants:- ICFA labs and universities; NRNs, TEN-155 and EU in Europe; I2 + ESnet + ?? in USA; bandwidth and service suppliers; other disciplines • Broad objective:- • try to simplify complex arrangements over Atlantic • see how QoS/DS etc. could improve situation for general traffic and disciplinary traffic • More specifically:- • review first tests with QoS/DS over Atlantic • review Europe/US gateways and look for improvements • coordinate arrangements for “labelling” traffic • better coordination of transit and global cost sharing (first discussions??). Maybe better after first QoS/DS pilot projects.

33. Submarine cables

34. Introducing Project OXYGEN ™ The next set of slides are selected from presentations by the Project Oxygen management at a recent Data Gathering Meeting They are publicly available on the Web. TM

35. What is Project OXYGEN? • A global optical fiber cable Network • 158,000 km of cable: 150,000 submarine, 8,000 terrestrial • 100 landing points in 73 countries and locations • A flexible routed network • 3 Network Management Centers • Unprecedented international bandwidth

36. How is Project OXYGEN different? • Pricing independent of distance and destination • Network rather than point-to-point system • True bandwidth on demand with flexible routing rather than fixed circuits • Planned global infrastructure

39. World Class Sponsors • Alcatel Network Systems • TYCO (ex-AT&T SSI) • NEC • Mitsui & Co. • Sumitomo Corp. • NTT International • Corning • Lucent Technologies. • JP Morgan(financial advisors)

43. Costs

46. July overview(to countries where we would normally expect “good” performance)

47. July 1998 overviewto countries where we might expect problems

48. Personal comments • Networking, telecoms and the EU are all complex topics • Since many people don’t want to disagree openly, they often try to hide their disagreements in impenetrable arguments and complex language. • Working in that environment can be very tiring/frustrating. As scientists and/or engineers we (I) prefer to say what we (I) think, and disagree, if necessary. • I believe that providing excellent Internet service during the whole period 1999-2002 is a basic requirement for European Research and Technical Development, and that this clear message should come through in the FP5 paperwork. This is not yet the case. Keep up the pressure!!

49. Can we (the people in the room) do anything to help? (1) • Keep lobbying that a good pan-European research network needs to be openly accepted as a fundamental component of FP5. We need to do a better selling job on:- • University heads • Fellow researchers (scientists and non-scientists) • Politicians & civil servants • Telecoms and Internet suppliers • Industry and commerce • Note that we have still not managed to create the US synergy between all of these groups.

50. Can we (the people in the room) do anything to help? (2) • Personally encourage competition for service provision in the liberalised era after January 1998 (or whenever it arrives chez vous). Especially competition for European infrastructure. • Greece, Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal and Spain have a variety of waivers concerning the dates by which they must implement full competition. • For the provision of alternative infrastructures, where competition across the bulk of the EU started already in July 1996, the extensions authorised were only for a few months, with Greece being the last to liberalise, at the start of October 1997. • For voice telephony and networks, where the normal starting date was January 1998, the extensions are somewhat longer, with liberalisation arriving in Spain at the end of November 1998, in Ireland at the start of January 2000, and in Greece at the end of December 2000.