Communications Planning Group

UC Davis Campus Report

Submitted by Information and Educational Technology's Communications Resources (CR).

January, 2003

Campus- and Wide-area Networking

Wireless Communications

Campus- and Wide-area Networking

CENIC Optical Network Infrastructure (ONI)

ONI (Optical Network Infrastructure), CENIC's project to upgrade and expand CalREN2, is nearing the deployment stage for UC Davis. Fiber optic facilities for the backbone and for the campus "last mile" connections are almost ready, with the electronics expected to be operational by the end of June. Construction is complete on the Davis end of the campus's primary ONI "last mile" connection. UC Davis's second ONI connection will connect to the Medical Center through the CENIC Point of Presence (1107 9th street in Sacramento). This will provide robust diversity for both the main campus and the Medical Center.

CENIC Sacramento Wide Area Networking Project (SWAN)

The ONI project work is occurring simultaneously with the SWAN project. Some facilities involved in SWAN are sharing rights of way, duct occupancy agreements, and joint use agreements with the ONI fiber paths. Construction is complete on one of the two paths between the UC Davis main campus and the Medical Center, and the second path is nearly complete. Wave Division Multiplexing is the method used to provide multiple gigabit Ethernet connections between the two locations, as well as providing a carrier facility for voice toll bypass.

Infrastructure Planning and Engineering

IET, through its Communications Resources (CR) department, continues to support the accelerating pace of new construction and remodel activity on the main campus and in off-campus locations. Infrastructure plans for the campus include fourteen major studies for expansion to undeveloped property as well as within existing districts on the campus. This expansion is in addition to the existing seventy-four major capital, facilities, and departmental projects already underway.

IET has also initiated an effort to review the status of horizontal cabling on the campus in an effort to ensure that the capacity of the building wiring is able to keep pace with emerging technology and user requirements.

Mondavi Center Cabling

During construction of the Mondavi Center, IET worked with the architects to assure that adequate cabling was provided, both from our external campus physical plant and from the internal building wiring perspectives. Once operational, a concern arose about the ability of the Mondavi telecommunications system to handle the high volume of requests for tickets. During the early weeks of the Mondavi's operations, Communications Resources coordinated numerous plans to assure that all telephone callers were provided access to the necessary Mondavi staff in order to process ticket requests.

In November, former President Clinton visited the campus and spoke to a packed house in Mondavi, an event that featured a simulcast to Freeborn Hall. Many departments, including CR, coordinated the video simulcast.

Packeteer Systems Deployment

CR acquired and installed the first Packeteer network traffic shaping system between the Student Housing Network (ResNet) and the UCD main campus core router. This Packeteer system places limits on the amount of network traffic coming from the residence halls before it merges with the campus network traffic. The second Packeteer system was deployed between the main campus "head-end" router and the campus "border" router. This places limits on the total combined campus network and Resnet network traffic before it exited the campus via the "border" router.

While UC Davis has an OC-12 network backbone for supporting 622 Mbps of traffic going to the California Regional Network (Calren2) and the Commodity Internet link, financial considerations require the total amount of Commodity Internet network traffic to be limited to108 Mbps at any given time. The UCD NOC has not placed any limits on the educational Calren2 inbound and outbound network traffic.

Wireless Communications

Mobile Computing Authentication Advanced Technology Project

A solution for authenticating mobile computing devices to the wireless network has been developed and implemented. This solution requires that mobile users register the MAC address of the Network Interface Card (NIC) in their computer with the campus computing account database. The user must then log in to the public UC Davis wireless network through a Web-based login page every time they want to connect. The authentication is Kerberos-based, and requires that wireless users configure a specific system name as their wireless "SSID." Once successfully logged in, DHCP is used to grant the computer a valid UC Davis network address. The project drew on the expertise of the campus technical community and consultation with other institutions, IET staff, and UC Davis campus constituents. For more information regarding wireless at UC Davis, see the Wireless Web site.