While COVID-19 presents unprecedented uncertainty, Research and Education Networks (“R&E Networks”) will play an important role in supporting our campuses and K12 schools as they move online. Infrastructure usage patterns are already changing greatly from traditional campus learning environments, in part because of the massive shift of users from purpose-built campus networks to consumer-oriented home networks.
When students and faculty are on campus, they use a well-tuned campus infrastructure that is blended with remote cloud computing resources through state and regional R&E networks and Internet2. Those networks are provisioned with substantial capacity for research data and also afford “headroom” for activities like Learning Management Systems and video-based online learning applications. These learning applications are often hosted on servers that are actually located off-campus in cloud computing data centers. When on campus, student traffic travels over R&E networks to these remote data centers. We can expect that network traffic patterns will change when campuses implement COVID-19 “work from home” and “learn from home”. This paper outlines a few scenarios on the potential effect this shift in the location of users may have on the way in which online resources are reached.
It is important to note that the following scenarios depict typical traffic patterns. There will be situations where a different traffic pattern will occur, or specialized engineering is in place that may impact specific campus patterns.
When students and faculty are on campus, they use a well-tuned campus infrastructure that is blended with remote cloud computing resources through state and regional R&E networks and Internet2. Those networks are provisioned with substantial capacity for research data and also afford “headroom” for activities like Learning Management Systems and video-based online learning applications. These learning applications are often hosted on servers that are actually located off-campus in cloud computing data centers. When on campus, student traffic travels over R&E networks to these remote data centers. We can expect that network traffic patterns will change when campuses implement COVID-19 “work from home” and “learn from home”. This paper outlines a few scenarios on the potential effect this shift in the location of users may have on the way in which online resources are reached.
It is important to note that the following scenarios depict typical traffic patterns. There will be situations where a different traffic pattern will occur, or specialized engineering is in place that may impact specific campus patterns.
- Scenario 1 - How Network Access to Online Resources Works from Campus Today and how campus participants in online education will continue to work
- Scenario #2 - Students and Faculty learn/work from home and campus moves teaching online using cloud-based resources
- Cloud Scaling Capacity
- Home Network Types and Wi-Fi Routers/Devices
- R&E support for Community Anchor Institutions
