ERNET

Education and Research Network (ERNET), India is an autonomous scientific society of Ministry of Communications and Information Technology (Govt. of India). ERNET has made a significant contribution to the emergence of networking in the country. It practically brought the Internet to India and has built up national capabilities in the area of net-working, especially in protocol software engineering. It has not only succeeded in building a large network that provides various facilities to the intellectual segment of Indian society—the research and education community, it has over the years become a trendsetter in the field of networking.

Focus

ERNET is largest nationwide terrestrial and satellite network with point of presence located at the premiere educational and research institutions in major cities of the country. Focus of ERNET is not limited to just providing connectivity, but to meet the entire needs of the educational and research institutions by hosting and providing relevant information to their users. Research and Development and Training are integral parts of ERNET activities. The activities at ERNET India are organized around five technology focus areas:

Beginning

ERNET was initiated in 1986 by the Department of Electronics (DoE), with funding support from the Government of India and United Nations Development Program (UNDP), involving eight premier institutions as participating agencies—NCST (National Centre for Software Technology) Bombay, IISc (Indian Institute of Science) Bangalore, five IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology) at Delhi, Bombay, Kanpur, Kharagpur and Madras, and the DoE, New Delhi. ERNET began as a multi protocol network with both the TCP/IP and the OSI-IP protocol stacks running over the leased-line portion of the backbone. Since 1995, however, almost all traffic is carried over TCP/IP.[1]

History of ERNET

ERNET backbone

ERNET backbone is a sophisticated link of terrestrial and satellite-based wide area networks. The satellite WAN, using VSAT technology. The VSAT network acts as an overlay for the terrestrial WAN by providing backup links between the backbone sites. International connectivity is achieved through gateways at New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and Kolkata, with a total capacity of 6.64 Mb. Daily traffic over ERNET exceeds 20 GB. ERNET architecture is based on industry standard TCP/IP protocol.

ERNET backbone is being enabled to support IPv6.[3]

ERNET international gateway and PoP sites

The ERNET is supported by the following backbone sites which enable organizations located at different geographical locations to access various services.

References

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 11/11/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.