State project bwNET2020+

The progressive digitalization that is emerging nowadays demands secure and robust high performance communication networks. Those networks have long become an essential infrastructure equally needed by society and economy determining their competitiveness. Increasingly powerful infrastructures with very high data rates (up to 1 Tbit/s) and advances in telecommunications and cellular networks like 5G offer new possibilities to enable ways to interact with current networking concepts and applications. These infrastructures can also support secure and robust network operation: Analogous to applications from the "cloud" they can provide functions for network operation from a central location and/ or dynamically place network junctures with so-called Service Function Chaining (SFC) in a demand-oriented way. Service Function Chaining together with other enabling technologies such as software-defined networks (SDN), flexibly programmable data paths (P4) and network function virtualisation (NFV), have new and improved potentials for implementing innovations quickly and flexibly.
By programming in software, networks can be adapted to special requirements as needed or reprogrammed when requirements change.
Therefore, in the bwNET2020+ innovation project, experts for network operation and network research are to work closely together in a proven manner to evaluate and test new technologies, identify forward-looking solutions and, where suitable, provide support in transferring these solutions step-by-step to the BelWü network or the campus networks. The increasing data rates and the enabling technologies make the vision of so-called self-driving networks appear realistic in the long term and also necessary due to the increasing complexity of the networks.

The main goals of the bwNet2020+ project are:

• Evaluation of Enabling Technologies such as SDN, SFC, NFV, P4 in 400 Gbit/s networks and in network environments with 5G.
• To make the vision of self-driving networks feasible by also considering the real network infrastructure in BelWü and the campus networks using prototypical implementations and show cases.
• Continuation and expansion of the BelWü test infrastructure.
• Implementation of selected solutions and services in the operating environment

The bwNET2020+ innovation project aims to leverage the just mentioned technologies on the basis of powerful and flexible (e.g. through SDN, SFC P4) networks in order to advance current implementations of the BelWü network as well as present university networks. The goal is to introduce systematically new possibilities of adaptation in a targeted and path-breaking manner wherever reasonable. With a strong focus on use cases, that show how concrete first steps towards self-driving networks could be in the context of BelWü and campus networks, network operation and network research are working closely together.

Completed project 01/2020 — 12/2023.