The Scientific Programme of the Track 1 - 
Engineering the Network for the NATO Green Paper Report

Introduction

The dynamic and innovative nature of the CEENet Education with respect to
the organization and the execution of the workshops in the areas of
technology, management and policy was broaden and reinforced again during
the Sixth CEENet Workshop on Network Technology held in Budapest from
August 19 to August 27, 2000. This was particularly true for Track 1:
Engineering the Network - NATO ANW, colored for the first time with two
new features: a pre-workshop course in distance education and a series of
lectures covering the cutting edge developments in the area of network
protocols.

Building on the previous experience in distance education and learning,
developed through the Track 3 - Wired Education, a group of key lecturers
from the Engineering the Network track designed and implemented a
pre-workshop curriculum that included fundamental issues, principles and
methods to be learned by the participants in order to provide them with
the essential knowledge required to gain basic understanding in network
engineering, to improve the selection process for the face-to-face
workshop in Budapest, as well as to offer the right environment for
introducing more advanced topics for the actual workshop.

The results were indeed gratifying, as the analysis of the evaluation of
the workshop by the lecturers and the students indicates, both in the very
good quality of the Programme content carried out in Budapest and the
students present at the workshop.

Lecturers and Lectures

The following pool of lecturers and instructors carried all of the
lectures, recicitations and labs in the Engineering the Network track out:

Ksenija Furman, MSc. Manager, Academic and Research Network of Slovenia -
ARNES

Richard Perlman, Product and Documentation Manager, Lucent Technologies

August Jauk, M.Sc. Technical Director, Academic and Research Network of
Slovenia - ARNES

Oliver B. Popov, Ph.D. Professor, University St. Cyril and Methodius,
Macedonia, and MARNet

Francois Fluckiger, Ph.D. Professor, CERN, University of Geneva

Gorazd Bozic, M.Sc. CERT Manager, Academic and Research Network of
Slovenia - ARNES

Wolfgang Schneider, Ph.D. GMD, DFN and University of Darmstadt

George Macri, M.Sc. Country Manager, Teleglobe

Vesna Manojlovich , M.Sc. Support and Services, RIPE NCC

Franjo Majstor, B.Sc. Consultant, EMEA, Cisco Systems

Andres Szekely, M.Sc. Network designer, Cisco Systems, Hungary


The lecturers and the instructors worked very hard during the lectures and
labs, and moreover during the informal meetings and free lab hours, to
interact with the students and to enrich the live and vigorous education
program with comments, discussions and appropriate explanations. The
Programme included topics such as:

Serial Communications: there was a short overview of the basics such as
different types of communications lines, the nature of synchronous and
asynchronous transmission, protocols, ISDN service, and the three As
(access, authorization, and authentication) procedures, cable modems,
virtual private networks (VPNs) and IPSec.

The Advanced Routing: the enumeration of the routing protocols and the
primary objectives of protocol engineering in the domain of routing
(specifications, design and development), IGP in a global context, the
OSPF and its engineering attributes and implementation procedures.

Quality of Service: congestion and flow control, the four parameters:
delay, jitter, bandwidth, and reliability, how it affects design and what
are the different classes of service, ways for observation, monitoring and
measuring, integration and optimization. The role of TCP in flow control
and congestion, in addition to the ramifications and implications to other
topics such as Differentiated Services and Quality of Service.

The Multimedia Challenge to the Infrastructure: high applications over a
low infrastructure: a reality or an illusion - where simulation really
makes the difference, some unqualified requirements, protocols for real
time applications, mirroring and replication, and IP multicasting.

Network Management: the architecture and the organization, tools for
monitoring, how to extract and select the necessary data, performance
analysis and predictions, models of fault management, accounting,
planning, how to configure an optimal network for your needs, using the
available commercial and non-commercial net management packages.

IPv6: the next generation IP protocol, designed to improve scalability,
security, network maintenance and management, how and when to migrate to
IPv6, tools needed for transition, address allocation and configuration,
and mobility, and the DNS set-up.

Network Security: internal and external security, from private to
distributed systems, an overview of the data encryption standards,
security TCP/IP levels, types of attack, security incidents, firewalls,
tools to support E-commerce, IPSec, secure e-mail, and the PKI technology

The Pragmatics of Network Operations: organization of a LIR, updating and
working with the RIPE databases, international entities CENTR, ICANN and
CORE, user support, preserving your TLD, and implementing a reliable and
secure DNS.

Conclusions

It is clear that the combined efforts of the organizers, the lecturers,
the sponsors and more important the interest and the diligence of the
students, produced rather exceptional results and fulfillment of all the
objectives set prior to the Workshop, namely to train the students from
CEE and FSU on the fundamentals of the Internet and network technology by
the well recognized international experts as key vehicles towards
technical and technological competence, progress and democratic and
sustainable development of their respective countries and societies, and
to create the right amount of a seed knowledge that will be later
propagated in home settings, and to build and foster the human interaction
from different ethnical, social and cultural backgrounds to attain one of
the main goals pf CEENet - establishing a human network that co-operates
and works together across the physical and psychological frontiers.

The education environment, due to generous donation of equipment by CISCO,
and the previous preparations by the organizers, the stuff of CEU CC, and
the core lecturers was more then adequate and the operations were most of
the time flawless. Due to the another donation provided by O'Reilly in
books and software, estimated value of about 40 000 USD, all of the
participants and their respective organizations and institutions were
presented with much needed literature and software, often rather difficult
to obtain in their developing countries.

Finally, the everlasting gratitude and sincere appreciation by the
organizers, the lecturers and the students is due to the NATO Science
Committee and Computer Networking Panel who through their generous grant
made the Workshop reality and thus produced another important step in the
convergence of all the countries in CEE region and FSU towards the
community of countries that are based on free flow of information and
access of it.



 
(1) To enumerate the necessary conditions, identify the technical level
and structural organization, as well as to posit the required knowledge of
the technology in order to achieve a technically feasible and sustainable
network (2) To create and foster the human network among the participants,
which is later crucial in their respective problem solving environment

Expected short term and long-term objectives of the ANW for CP countries:

(1) To increase the level of the know-how with respect to network
technology among the key people that will take part in running various
networks and network operations (2) Will make them aware in the latest
developments and the start of the art of the technology, (3) Transfer of
the teaching methods and practices from the developed countries to the
developing ones

Expected short term and long-term objectives of the ANW for the NATO
countries

(1) Inducement of networking as a vehicle for convergence towards to NATO
countries (2) Proliferation of the CIT and thus an increase of the
plausible pool of markets (3) Political stability in the regions of CEE
and FSU through building the necessary communication infrastructure for
free information flow and accessibility