Services
Some of the services of REDIMadrid that can be regarded as an added-value to the basic high-speed data transfer service are the following.
Multicast
REDIMadrid is configured, in coordination with the member institutions and RedIRIS, to provide native IP multicast service. This service enables the efficient delivery of packets to a set of end systems that have solicited a given group by means of IGMP (Internet Group Management Protocol). The routing protocol used is PIM sparse mode version 2, whose main features are:
- On demand data distribution, unlike flood and prune protocols
- It builds a single shared tree per group, rather than a tree per source-group, which requires smaller forwarding tables. The consequent suboptimum routing can be avoided by moving to source-rooted trees if the amount of traffic justifies the change
- It is independent of the existing unicast routing protocol, it is suitable for any WAN or LAN scenario, and can be complemented with access lists to select optimum rendez-vous points (RP) according to the implicit administrative scope of the session. Furthermore, it is possible to support Inter-domain routing with MSDP (Multicast Source Discovery Protocol).
- Available implementations support bidirectional trees, which are specifically useful when the number multicast sources is high (many-to-many sessions).
- It can easily provide support to the SSM (Source Specific Multicast) concept brought in by IGMPv3, suitable for streaming applications (one-to-many and few-to-many cases), due to its implicit security and for providing a natural solution for the group collision problem.
QoS
One of the main objectives of the Community of Madrid Research Network is to offer a high capacity data transport service that makes possible networked experiences and applications that were not feasible in the past. For that purpose, the network offers procedures that enable the usage of network resources at any time with the service levels required for research and development activities. Several QoS policies and implementation mechanisms are available. The general rule tends to prioritize the traffic that follows the main objectives of the network and limit any other traffic.
VPN/VLAN
Aiming at satisfying the main communication needs among the research groups of the Comunidad de Madrid, REDIMadrid offers the possibility to create Virtual Private Networks (VPN) and Virtual Local Area Networks (VLAN), according to their logical connectivity requirements. This initiative facilitates the work in scenarios that require direct communication between several hosts that belong to the same project, even though they are located in different sites. In this way, travelling and management costs are reduced, and, at the same time, there is an implicit privacy gain.
IPv6
Since the beginning of 2005 REDIMadrid will offer native IPv6 service featuring dual hardware-based IPv4-IPv6 forwarding to support experiments with this new IP version. This way, affiliated centres will have Internet access using global IPv6 addressing without the need for tunnels IPv6/IPv4, 6to4, etc.
