The European Research and Education community is using in Europe a dedicated infrastructure mainly characterized by a very high performance any-to-any connectivity and end to end advanced services such as Multicast and IPv6.
This infrastructure supports both research into telecommunications, computing and networking as well as the use of computers, telecommunications and networking for research and development in other fields.
But an other particularity of Research and Education networks is to provide this connectivity and these services through multiple independent technical and administrative domains. The national research and education networks provide telecommunications networking within their respective countries (i.e. Superjanet). They are complemented by GEANT, the pan-European network that interconnects these national networks. And in some countries the Universities and Research Labs are primary connected to Metropolitan or Regional networks and not directly to the National Research networks (i.e. in UK).
All advanced services that are deployed in the R&E infrastructure have a sense if they are available end-to-end.
Thanks to the good co-operation between the different domains, advanced services are today possible, such as Multicast service or IPv6 pilot service.
The challenge for Universities and Research Labs is to deploy the required services (security, accounting, flow monitoring, multicast, CoS, IPv6...) and keep an efficient utilization of the high speed access link. This role is typically performed by the CPE (Customer Premise Equipment) router that is the frontier between the WAN/MAN and the LAN environment. The challenge for this router is to manage all services without compromise on performance and robustness. It is also important to keep all functions in one single CPE equipment to reduce investment and operational cost.
