Features

NKN is designed as a Smart Ultra High Bandwidth network that seamlessly interconnects the leading Scientific and Technological institutions which are pursuing world-class research and development. NKN design is inherently proactive; it takes into account the requirements that may occur in the near term and long term.

Collaborations At Global Level

At the International front, NKN has peered with various global National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) such as Asi@connect in Asia Pacific, CERN and GEANT in Europe, SingAREN in Singapore, Internet2 in USA, TENET in South Africa and NORDUnet for Nordic countries. NKN as part of India’s neighbourhood policy has been extended to BdREN in Bangladesh, DrukREN in Bhutan, LEARN in Sri Lanka and HNM in Maldives. NKN also has 3 International PoPs in Singapore, Amsterdam and Geneva-CERN.

National Knowledge Network (NKN) bridges the existing knowledge gap in the country and helps to evolve as a Knowledge Society and spur economic activities in the Knowledge domain. It facilitates the development of India’s information infrastructure, stimulate research, and create next generation applications and services.

Some of the salient features of the NKN are:

Establishing Connectivity for Knowledge and information sharing.
Enabling Collaborative Research in emerging areas such as Climate Modelling.
Facilitating distance education in specialized fields such as medicine and emerging high-tech areas covering info-bio-nano technology.
Facilitating an ultra high speed e-governance backbone for information sharing.

NKN will also act as a test bed for research in the area of network, security and delivery models for various services. As NKN is a new initiative, it will leverage existing initiatives to ensure faster roll out with modest investment.

Based on the design objective, geographical spread and expected usage, the following technical features are envisaged for NKN:

NKN is a protocol independent network and is designed to carry multiprotocol traffic.
NKN offers hierarchical Quality of Service (QoS) for real time traffic (voice and video) and guaranteed bandwidth for business critical applications.
NKN supports IPv6 transport, IPv6 networking and IPv6 MPLS VPN services along with IPv4 facilities.
NKN service provisioning is internal to the network and does not depend on telecom service providers.
NKN supports multicast enabled VPN for multicast applications in IPv4 and IPv6.
NKN management supports services such as Multimedia Conferencing, e-access, digital library and central data centre.
NKN will provide access to secure data centre with Information Assurance.