Earlier Projects

National QoS Test Bed

The Ministry of Information Technology (DIT) has funded a project for establishing a nationwide IP based QoS network to address the growing trends of the knowledge based society to provide all resources (educational, professional, social and commercial) and Internet enabled services to the users. ERNET India in association with premier institutions including IITs, IISc, and CDAC initiated the project. Each institution has been assigned different role for development and experiment of QoS aware applications and share their expertise in the area of networking technologies. To test and experiment the concept of QoS, applications like IP Telephony and Video Conferencing for distance learning / e-Learning have been chosen.

ERNET India has setup QoS enabled network testbed among institutions with 2Mbps link from its backbone. All participating institutions are fine-tuning the network architecture and network engineering processes to lead to best practices for QoS assured network and its services. The participating institutions are linked to each other with Label Switch Paths (LSPs) for carrying out the experiments and studies on the testbed. ERNET India has also deployed MPLS on its backbone to ensure better control on bandwidth for delivering services and the project has been successfully completed.

Network Monitoring Tool

Internet has seen exponential growth in the last decade. It has become a preferred medium for exchange of information across the world. Effectiveness of communication over Internet has also attracted criminal elements in using this for cyber crime. With the increase of usage of Internet and cyber crime, the need to monitor the traffic especially against unwanted content also increased with time. The Internet is used by anti-social elements as a tool against legitimate usage of Internet.

Network Monitoring Tool (NMT) has been developed by ERNET India and IIT Kanpur for monitoring the illegal and unauthorized communication leading to cyber crime over Internet. The NMT will be used to collect specific information from Internet and reconstruct the same into a readable format. The data collected can be used by the investigating agencies for the purpose of evidence collection against any unlawful activities over Internet.

The tool operates in a non-intrusive manner and is capable of monitoring all packets passing through a link without injecting any data into the network. It captures information based on source/destination IP addresses, port numbers, login IDs, e-mails headers like - subject of messages, e-mail address, URLs, and text string etc.

The focus area of the research was to investigate the Internet packet capturing, filtering algorithms, encoding of packets, data communication through serial port for secure and dedicated remote control and performance measurement etc.

NMT was deployed and tested at ERNET POP and handed over to CBI for field trials. Capabilities of NMT were presented to a delegation from Cabinet Secretariat and senior DIT officials. Members showed interest in the product and the capabilities developed in the process