National Knowledge Network to become operational in 2 years

S V. Raghavan, Scientific Secretary, Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser(R), greeting R. Chidambaram, Principal Scientific Adviser, at a conference in Chennai on Monday. Photo: R. Shivaji Rao

The National Knowledge Network (NKN) will become fully operational in two years, said R. Chidambaram, Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India, on Monday.

Delivering the inaugural address at the two-day seventh ‘Indo-Australian conference on IT security', he said the NKN would be set up by the National Informatics Centre with the core backbone of 2.5 gigabits per second (Gbps) multiple optical network, but it will be raised to 10 Gbps, 40 Gbps and 100 Gbps, depending on demand, and all the 1,500 institutions would be connected to the core backbone. Currently, 500 premier institutions were linked to the NKN.

“It is going to be a highly reliable network and the Prime Minister wants all knowledge institutions to be connected to the optical fibre network of NKN. Now, they are connected at 1 Gbps and it will go up with increase in demand. The earliest things we did was to start using it for virtual classroom…If you have low latency high speed network like this it becomes easier for students to interact with faculty. Now, we are using it for telemedicine to set up a brain grid,” he said.

Mr. Chidambaram said that India wanted international collaboration across the board in research and development and science and technology on equal partnership basis and said that the NKN would act as a test bed for research in the area of network, security and delivery models for various services.

The conference is jointly organised by Society for Electronic Transactions and Security (SETS), Queensland University of Technology, Australia and Indian Institute of Technology Madras, to discuss emerging security technologies that were needed especially in view of wireless and mobile communication.

S.V. Raghavan, Scientific Secretary, Office of the Principal Scientific Adviser, Government of India, talked about India-Australia collaboration in the area of critical information infrastructure protection against denial of service. Later, this conference would be followed up with a workshop and research work on detecting and mitigating denial of service.