NORDUnet/hks 1992-08-18 The NORDUnet network NORDUnet is a collaboration between the national research networks in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. Its purpose is to provide the national research and education communities with an efficient networking service which ensures coherence of the national R & D networks and connects these to similar networks in the rest of Europe and the world. This chapter describes the NORDUnet network in terms of purpose, organization, general technology and the layer 3 services it provides to it's users today. It was first prepared as part of an open tender for the NORDUnet infrastructure and not as a general NORDUnet description. Now it is becoming a general description so it may need some revising. Comments are welcome. Organization NORDUnet is organized as a consortium agreement between the national networks DENet, FUNET, SUNET, SURIS and UNINETT. The administration is an integral part of UNI-C in Denmark. UNI-C is a state corporation with 130 employees formed as merger between the computing centres of the three major universities in Denmark. NORDUnet has contracted its work mainly to the national organizations. The network operations center has been contracted to KTH/SUNET. It is their responsibility to monitor the service, configure the Translan bridges and Cisco routers (IP) as well as coordinate operational issues. KTH also manages the central point for NORDUnet EARN/NJE service which runs on top of TCP/IP. The X.25 and CLNS operations have been contracted to SINTEF RUNIT and DECNET operations to UNI-C. A separate document called "NORDUnet Organization 1992" has more details than this mainly technical description of the network. NORDUnet points of presence NORDUnet has five points of presence (POP's), one in each of the Nordic countries. Denmark UNI-C Building 305 DTH DK-2800 Lyngby DENMARK UNI-C is a national computing center offering connectivity to the academic and research community in Denmark. The Danish backbone, DENet, is based on single 2 Mbit/s ethernet which is extended with 3-COM bridges. The leaf sites are connected with 3-COM routers. The NORDUnet DECNET gateway to SPAN and HEPNET (DEC WANrouter 500) is located at UNI-C. The Danish EUnet also connects to NORDUnet via UNI-C. From UNI-C in Denmark 9.6 Kbit/s leased lines go to Warsaw in Poland, Moscow in Russia and Frascati in Italy. The line to Poland will be substituted by a 64 Kbit/s Tele-X satellite connection to KTH, Sweden. UNI-Cs is at present connected to NORDUnet with a 256 Kbit/s leased line to KTH. The access point has PTT managed multiplexer capacity on site. Finland FUNET/VTKK Tietotie 6 Espoo Finland FUNET is the Finnish University and Research Network located at the national center of scientific computing. FUNET provides an information and archive service which has become the largest single source of data in NORDUnet. FUNET is mainly based on Cisco routers connected by leased lines. These lines will be replaced by a Datanet provided Stratacom based frame relay network. FUNET provides connectivity to the national EUnet network and has high speed interconnections with the commercial IP service providers Datanet (+ InfoLan) and LanLink. From Finland there is dialup EUnet connectivity to the Baltic countries and the Russia. A leased 64 Kbit/s connection to Estonia has recently been established by FUNET. The current NORDUnet connection is 512 Kbit/s leased line to KTH. The access point is equipped with Finnish Telecom managed multiplexers and a FDDI MAN with microwave and fiber connections directly to the long distance POP. This site also has an 8 Mbit/s satellite connection to CERN. This connection is part of the CHEOPS pilot project and uses ESA's Olympus satellite. Iceland SURIS University of Iceland Dunhaga 5 IS-107 Reykjavik Iceland SURIS is the national research network for Iceland and also provides EUnet services to all interested customers. The current NORDUnet connection is a 64 Kbit/s leased satellite line to KTH. Norway Sintef Runit (physical location of equipment) Høyskoleringen 7I 7034 Trondheim Uninett A/S (organizer) Box 6883 7002 Trondheim UNINETT is the Norwegian research and education network and also supports connection to the national EUnet Service. UNINETT is expected to be a limited company owned by the state. UNINETT has a multiprotocol network for IP, DECnet and X.25. The primary links are between cisco routers while the backup links are between X.25 switches. UNINETT and the universities are cooperating with the PTT in a 34 Mbit/s Supernett Multiprotocol network based on Network Systems routers with IP being the first operational protocol. From Norway there exists a 9.6 Kbit/s satellite connection to Lithuania. The current NORDUnet connection is 256 Kbit/s leased line to KTH. Sweden KTH/SUNET S-100 44 Stockholm Sweden SUNET is the Swedish University network that is based on 2 Mbit/s leased line connections between Ciscos at six major sites. There is connectivity from KTH to the national EUnet backbone and commercial IP service providers SwipNet and TIPnet that provides connectivity also to most research establishments that used to be connected to SUNET. In conjunction with the Ebone 92 effort KTH has now 256Kbit/s connection to London and 512 Kbit/s connection to Amsterdam. A separate 64 Kbit/s connection to the IXI X.25 service also in Amsterdam. 786 Kbit/s connection to Fix-East in the US as a joint effort with Swipnet, Uunet and of course the NSFNET appointer International Connections Manager US Sprint. Three 64 Kbit/s Tele-X satellite connections to Warsaw Poland and Tallin and Tartu in Estonia are under preparation. The site has multiplexer for STI Link Service and separate microvawe links to Kista. NORDUnet technical structure Layer 1 and 2 connectivity The NORDUnet backbone was based on Vitalink Translan Ethernet bridges connecting Denmark, Finland and Norway to Sweden in a star configuration, managed by KTH. The Translan bridges have been phased out in favor of direct Cisco to Cisco interconnection with HyBridge bridging support for LLC2 and possible pilot needs. The connection to Iceland is based on direct Cisco to Cisco connection since they use only IP. In each of the four ethernet connected countries a Cisco router routes IP, DECNET Phase IV and CLNS. The X.25 (84)/CONS protocol is carried using LLC2 protocol between Megapak X.25 switches. All Cisco routers do have X.25 software for special needs but it has not been considered suitable for replacing the directly LLC2 connected Megapak X.25 switches. Layer 3 services NORDUnet provides IP, DECNET, X.25 and CLNS layer 3 services, in this order of volume. Currently NORDUnet leases bandwidth in form raw lines and adds value by providing the network layer protocols in a coordinated fashion with equipment operated through various contracts. The national networks which are the NORDUnet customers see it as a "NORDUnet plug" which provides different service "pins". NJE traffic is transported over TCP/IP. The CLNS (including DECNET Phase V) pilot traffic is carried by the same Cisco's as the production traffic. The external connections are mainly based on Cisco routers. NORDUnet runs IP and CLNS protocols to the US and IP, CLNS and DECNET IV to Europe. X.25 connectivity to Europe is provided via a direct connection to the IXI network. IP service NORDUnet participates in the worldwide TCP/IP Internet and requires the ability to fully control what routes are advertised to and from its Cisco routers in each country. In addition NORDUnet has agreements with various IP service providers. These agreements place additional routing policy restrictions on certain networks, paths and services. The Eurfopean traffic is being handled primarily through the Ebone. This means that routes to Nordic, European and US networks are advertised to the NORDUnet backbone including default networks for directing traffic to primary and secondary paths to the US. NORDUnet distributes routes using the BGP protocol with appropriate route redistribution filters. NORDUnet has different AS numbers in each country to ease the implementation of more complex routing schemes. DECNET service NORDUnet utilizes an exclusive DECNET Phase IV service that passes through all DECNET areas. Area numbers below 47 belong to the worldwide SPAN/HEP DECNET network which comprises of tens of thousands of nodes. The routing integrity is very important. Area numbers from 47 and up are shared by NORDUnet countries and must never be advertised to or from the SPAN/HEP backbone. This is achieved with maximum area filtering at the non-Nordic HEP and SPAN sites connected to NORDUnet. The NORDUnet backbone needs to advertise area 21 to all Nordic connection points except Iceland. Only area 21 should be advertised to the SPAN/HEP partners outside NORDUnet. Route filtering enforced this. In general, NORDUnet fully controls the DECNET phase IV configuration and no other DECNET networks or hosts may connect without prior written approval from NORDUnet management. The DECNET Phase IV service is in the future expected to be replaced by DECNET PHASE V which uses ISO CLNS. Until then DECNET Phase IV will stay in production. CLNS service The CLNS service is based on a NORDUnet ICD NSAP shared by all NORDUnet users as specified by the NORDUnet CLNS pilot project. The project has produced detailed recommendations on how to set up CLNS services in NORDUnet. In addition to the NORDUnet ICD there will be other NSAP's based on ICD (HEPNET for example), DXCC and possibly other allocation schemes. The NORDUnet backbone will support at least three parallel ISO CLNS routing domains with IS-IS and ISO IDRP protocols as deemed necessary. Currently the CLNS service is realized with static routes and IGRP. ISO CLNS service will also be used for the DECNET Phase V pilot and production traffic in parallel with DECNET phase IV service. This means that possible DECNET Phase IV to Phase V conversion support will not be enabled initially. Phase V migration issues are under study and it is clear that NORDUnet will utilize specially allocated ICD NSAP spaces and carefully engineered routing. The reports and recommendations from the NORDUnet CLNS pilot project concerning addressing, routing and DECNET Phase V migration issues are available on request. X.25 service NORDUnet provides an X.25 (84/88) service with support for ISO CONS relays, complex source and destination address transformation, parameter negotiation, 1024 byte packet size, packet window size, access control, accounting and at least 64 Kbit/s performance. In order to connect to the national academic X.25 networks, local X.25 access is connected to Megapak X.25 switches at the NORDUnet POP's. As part of the COSINE project there is a 64 Kbit/s connection between the Swedish Megapak switch and the IXI pilot network. There is also 9.6 Kbit/s connection from the ESAPAC network run by the European Space agency to the Danish Megapak switch. IXI and ESAPAC use other X.121 addressing schemes than NORDUnet. The NORDUnet scheme is based mainly on local public X.121 address spaces with prefixes for network selection and subaddresses for host selection. This means that the X.25 service has to switch or transform many types of parallel addressing schemes, handle different parameter negotiations etc.. Volume charging is not used anywhere on the NORDUnet backbone. Public X.25 service is bought and managed separately from the private academic X.25 networks by the individual user organizations that need it.