Peer-to-Peer

IIT Roorkee goes the wireless way

IIT Roorkee has deployed Wi-Fi in order to provide roaming wireless Internet access to its 4,000 students, says Abhinav Singh

IIT Roorkee, a premier engineering institute, has a campus that spans 365 acres of land. The institute’s 4,000 students now have first hand experience of roaming wirelessly within the campus without losing Internet connectivity. Wi-Fi has made the difference. Currently around 30% of the students have their own notebooks, but with the provision of campus-wide Wi-Fi connectivity, this number is expected to increase. The college, which has been a great seat of engineering education and practices since 1847, will go ahead with a WiMax implementation in the near future to connect to the backhaul network.

Existing network infrastructure

The existing LAN network at IIT Roorkee connects all the buildings using SM/MM OFC (covering a distance of 20 km) emanating from the Information Superhighway Center (ISC) in IIT Roorkee covering all departments and centers, individual faculty rooms, laboratories, rooms in married students’ hostels and cyber cafes in bachelor students’ hostels through wired connectivity. The Internet bandwidth capacity at IIT Roorkee is 45 Mbps and it is provided by VSNL. A BSNL leased line of 2 Mbps connects IIT Roorkee to its Saharanpur Campus (second campus), which is 45 km away. A third campus of IIT Roorkee at Greater Noida (NCR) is under construction.

The need for Wi-Fi

The wired LAN infrastructure lacked the flexibility to connect the entire campus. Also it was difficult to add students to the network as this required providing physical network infrastructure and additional investments. The Institute decided to take a new look at the network facilities and constituted a WiMAX/Wi-Fi committee in September 2006 under the Chairmanship of Prof. H K Verma, Deputy Director, to explore the wireless alternative. At that time, Intel (India) was doing a study for Uttarakhand State regarding feasibility of deploying WiMAX technology for the hilly regions of the State. Keeping in view its experience with the technology, Intel was invited by the committee to give a presentation on the potential and future of the technology. Subsequently, an MOU was signed between IIT Roorkee and Intel to collaborate on the effective use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the technical education system. A relevant part of the scope of this MOU was that Intel would assist IIT Roorkee in deploying wireless networking technologies.

Designing the WLAN

Several meetings were held between September-October 2006 to discuss network design issues wherein Intel played an active role through its experts in designing the WLAN. Finally it was decided that in the first phase Wi-Fi connectivity would be provided to all indoor and outdoor premises connecting nine hostels at the IIT Roorkee campus. Work on the project kicked off in November 2006 and Samtech, Delhi was chosen as the system integrator to implement the Wi-Fi project. Prof. Padam Kumar, Head Information Superhighway Center and Institute Computer Center, IIT Roorkee who was in charge of the implementation group explained, “As part of the implementation program a ‘Radio Frequency Survey’ of all the hostels was done and detailed wing-level maps prepared for the Wi-Fi network of each hostel. The survey aimed at providing full signal strength in every room, contiguous connectivity (block-to-block within hostels) and maximum Internet and Intranet bandwidth

on a per user basis.” A thorough evaluation exercise was carried out by the institute to choose the vendor for the implementation. Kumar adds, “In addition to D-Link, products from Cisco and Nortel were also evaluated during the evaluation exercise but we zeroed it on D-Link as its products were meeting our budget and the performance of the products were as per our expectations.”

The implementation project

The biggest challenge that IIT Roorkee faced was in choosing the right Access Point products without compromising on the quality of service. Through various meetings with experts from Intel, broad specifications of major components required for establishing a Wi-Fi network in the student hostels were drawn up. A pilot project of one hostel with about 400 students was initiated in December 2006, which became fully functional in the same month. In the pilot project about 42 APs and seven edge switches were deployed, which were connected from the hostel’s cyber café. Based on the feedback derived from the pilot project, the design was fine tuned and replicated to the rest of the hostels. By the end of May 2007, the wireless network was functional in all of the nine bachelor student hostels. In all, for the Wi-Fi project, 370 APs have been used to cover 4,000 students. Special emphasis was laid during the design and planning of the WLAN to meet the present requirement of throughput. Hence a customized approach was followed for setting up of WLAN.

Wi-Fi’s a lifestyle

The Wi-Fi connectivity has greatly helped in improving the quality of life of the IITians. Now the students can stay connected in the comfort of their rooms, lab or anywhere with the campus network and they do not have to frequent the Cyber Cafes for accessing the Internet. The Intranet connects them to a NAS (Network Attached Storage) box, which stores whitepapers, lecture notes, tutorials and class schedules. Apart from access to e-mail, Internet and discussion forums, and the expansion of the wireless network in the hostels is boosting communication and collaborative research among faculty and students. Students are able to use latest scientific and engineering software resources available over the Intranet and have remote access to the central computing facility allowing them to complete their routine tasks on a 24x7 basis. Through the Wi-Fi network, students are able to access software resources on the Internet, which includes MATLABS, GIS and ABACUS, which are part of their education curriculum.

Future technology

There are plans to expand the Wi-Fi network to newly built wings in some hostels at IIT Roorkee and second campus at Saharanpur, which is spread across 15 acres and has about 500 students. The work is in progress and is likely to finish by end March 2008. There are also plans for an audit exercise after the completion of the network. There are also plans to make the whole campus a Wi-Fi -zone and connect all the three campuses wirelessly using WiMAX in the backhaul.

abhinav.singh@expressindia.com