Cape Verde, off the west coast of Africa, is an archipelago of ten islands, 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 across the Atlantic Ocean. However, it was not possible for it to have access to this connectivity because it does not have its own academic network. This made Cape Verde ineligible to make use of fiber pairs from the Bella project (Building Europe Link to Latin America), for collaboration between the two regions.

Brazilian researchers saw in this case an opportunity for innovation and, together with 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 – Teaching and Research as a Service Network – offers all the functionalities of a virtual network as a service, and can, with this paradigm shift, help developing countries to deploy or even expand their academic networks at low cost.

“Cape Verde was an iconic case. The 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), participant in the project, led by Trinity College Dublin (TCD), in 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 supporting 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 superimposed on the existing physical infrastructure, with functionalities that operate in a virtualized way, which allows offering the benefits of a NREN with 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 deployment of connectivity and responses to congestion and outages. As it is cloud-based, it will also be convenient for providing relevant services to institutions, such as eduroam.

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

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

One of Renaas' partners is the Smart City CV Foundation, which develops a Smart Cities project to create an innovation ecosystem in Cape Verde. A partnership with federations of NRENs such as the West and Central Africa 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. 

To learn more about Géant's Innovation Program call, visit https://community.geant.org/community-programme-portfolio/innovation-programme/.