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In 2010, following a series of workshops and site visits, the team at NUST and SLAC worked with Pakistan’s Education and Research Network (PERN) and Pakistani Universities to put together an end-to-end (E2E) network monitoring infrastructure for PERN connected higher education sites. By the end of 2010 they had have installed the PingER monitoring tools and started gathering data at 18 sites in Pakistan. This includes 4 sites (NUST, COMSATS, PERN and NCP/Quaid-i-Azam) which have been in place for a longer time. In addition they are working on a further 8 monitoring sites. Over 2010 the number of monitoring host – remote host pairs (both in Pakistan) has increased from about 30 to over 220.
Pakistan is divided into five regions: Islamabad, Lahore, Peshawar, Quetta and Karachi. These regions are chosen on a geographical basis and the hosts included in each region are all in close proximity. It is expected that hosts in one region show a similar behavior while accessing hosts in another region. This helps in analyzing which region has better infrastructure and connectivity.
As the map below shows, Pakistan’s backbone is laid out from North to South and West to East. Peshawar region connects directly to Islamabad; Islamabad connects directly only to Lahore apart from Peshawar; Lahore accesses Karachi via Faisalabad and Quetta can only access rest of the country via Karachi.The figure below shows the main regions where the hosts are located and how the regions are connected by PERN:
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Map of the PERN backbone |
The difficulty of the installations has varied host to host. The technical installation has been simple and not resulted in delays. The delays between deciding to install a monitoring host and gathering measurements from the host have mostly been due to: machine availability; getting administrative approval within university; and delays in making the DNS record entry. The table below shows the history of the installations:
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