A Scientific Overview of Network Connectivity and Grid Infrastructure in South Asian Countries
The future of Computing in High Energy Physics (HEP) applications depends on both the Network and Grid infrastructure. Some South Asian countries such as India and Pakistan are making progress in this direction by not only building Grid clusters, but also by improving their network infrastructure. However to facilitate the use of these resources, they need to overcome the issues of network connectivity to be among the leading participants in Computing for HEP experiments. In this paper we classify the connectivity for academic and research institutions of South Asia. The quantitative measurements are carried out using the PingER methodology; an approach that induces minimal ICMP traffic to gather end-to-end network statistics. The PingER project has been measuring the Internet performance for the last decade. Currently the measurement infrastructure comprises of over 700 hosts in more than 130 countries which collectively represents approximately 99% of the world's Internet-connected population. Thus, we are well positioned to characterize the world's connectivity. Here we present the current state of the National Research and Educational Networks (NRENs) and Grid Infrastructure in the South Asian countries and identify the areas of concern. We also present comparisons between South Asia and other developing as well as developed regions. We show that there is a strong correlation between the Network performance and several Human Development indices.
Introduction
South Asia as Compared to the rest of the World Regions
Before we start to compare S. Asia to the rest of the world it is useful to look at World Internet Statistics[] . This shows that for most the developed world (US and Canada, W. Europe, Japan, Taiwan, S. Korea) typically 40% or more of the people have Internet connectivity while for S. Asia it is less than 5%, i.e. typically a factor of 10 less.
Figure 1 shows the packet loss to various regions of the world as seen from N. America. Since losses are fairly distance independent no attempt has been made to normalize the data. It is seen that the world divides up into two major super-regions: N. America, Europe, E. Asia and Oceania with losses below 0.1%, and Latin America, C. Asia, Russia, S.E. Asia, S. Asia and Africa with losses > 0.1% and as high as as a few per-cent. All countries are improving exponentially, but Africa is falling further behind most regions. In general, the packet losses have declined by almost 45% each year. However the progress for Africa and South Asia has been much slower.
The minimum RTT shown in Figure 2, is distance dependent. The RTT to North America is artificially low as the measurements are made from North America.
The large step for S. Asia in 2003 was due to the change over from satellite to fibre. as the result of gradual shift from Satellite to fiber. Central Asia (also Afghanistan) has hardly moved in its minimum RTT since it continues to use geostationary satellites. Africaand S. E. Asia are improving. Central Asia on the other hand has been stuck with geo-stationary satellites and so little change is seen for it. Latin America took a huge step down in RTT at the end of 1999 going from mainly satellite (>500ms) to 200ms (i.e. mainly landlines). S.E. Asia looks like a gradual improvement. For most of the other regions the improvements are marginal.
South Asia as seen from US and Europe
Figure 3 shows time series of the daily averaged derived TCP throughputs (in kbits/s) to S. Asia from SLAC. It can be seen that there are large fluctuations. These fluctuations are a characteristic of congested lines (typically the last mile). At weekends when people are not at work, there is less congestion and better throughput. It is also seen that the countries divide into two. India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives have better throughput 400-1200 kbits/s compared to Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Afghanistan with between 75 and 400 kbits/s.