Cases & Voices

Cape Verde is an archipelago of ten islands on the west coast of Africa with around 500,000 inhabitants. The country is on the route of the ELLALink submarine cable, the first to directly connect South America to Europe via the Atlantic Ocean. However, it was not possible for it to have access to this connectivity because it did not have its own academic network. This meant that Cape Verde did not qualify to make use of fiber pairs from the BELLA Project (Building the Europe Link to Latin America), for collaboration between the two regions.

(Source: RNP) Brazilian researchers saw this as an opportunity for innovation and together with the brazilian academic network (RNP) submitted a project approved in the 2022 call for the GÉANT Innovation Program to help Cape Verde build its academic network.

The initiative called Renaas – Education and Research Network as a Service – offers all the functionalities of a virtual network as a service, and can help developing countries to implement or even expand their academic networks at low cost.

“Cape Verde was an emblematic case. Institutions already have connectivity, there are commercial providers in the country. However, they do not have the privileges and facilities of an academic network”, declared Moisés Ribeiro, professor at the Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES), a participant in the project led by Trinity College Dublin (TCD), from Ireland.

Brazil's experience in helping other countries to build their academic networks came with Mozambique, after a bilateral cooperation agreement signed in 2013. RNP helped design the Mozambique network, in addition to assisting in the implementation of ICT services, training professionals and support telehealth and safety projects. Like Mozambique, Cape Verde is also part of the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CPLP).

Technology adopted

The Renaas project is based on Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), which proposes the creation of networks overlaid on the existing physical infrastructure, with functionalities that operate in a virtualized way, which makes it possible to offer the benefits of an NREN at lower costs.

“The proposed model was evaluated by Geánt as interesting even for developed academic networks”, informs Frank Slyne, from Trinity College Dublin. The infrastructure will enable rapid connectivity deployment and responses to congestion and failures. As it is cloud-based, it will also be convenient to provide relevant services to institutions, such as eduroam.

Renaas is the result of the confluence of other research projects and long-standing cooperation. It is worth mentioning the RARE testbed. There is the H2020 EU-BRAZIL FOOTBALL, which involved UFES in partnership with Trinity College, and the NosFVeraTO Working Group, which was part of the RNP Research and Development Program in 2018.

From the latter, the Brazilian startup Vixphy emerged, also participating in RENaaS, which offers the private cloud and NFV solution in open source.

One of Renaas' partners is the Smart City CV Foundation, which is developing a Smart Cities project to create an innovation ecosystem in Cape Verde. A partnership with NREN federations such as the West and Central African Research and Education Network (WACREN) is also being articulated, so that other developing countries can benefit from the results of the pilot in the country.

The project is expected to be completed by the end of December. In March 2023, GÉANT will hold a workshop to show the results.