[2023.03.21] Sungkyunkwan University's Central Academic Information Center, "We expect to increase campus life satisfaction and expand 5G specialized network by establishing Cisco Wireless LAN Wi-Fi 6E."
- SKKU National Program of Excellence in Software
- Hit1598
- 2023-04-06
[Interview] Choi Hyung-ki, a software professor at Sungkyunkwan University (Director of Information and Communication)
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the lives of individuals and organizations around the world. Almost all activities have been done online due to travel restrictions in countries around the world. The network became the infrastructure of life for everyone as the work of all organizations, as well as the school's education and personal food, clothing, and shelter, as well as hobbies were conducted online. We live in a time when the joke of "a seamless network connection from cradle to grave" is not awkward.
Now, every organization must provide fast, high-quality network services to its members and customers to improve competitiveness and succeed. The same is true of universities, the birthplace of the same amount to carry the future. Accordingly, many universities are improving their networks by mobilizing various strategies and methods, and in particular, they are actively working to improve students' campus living environment.
Why Sungkyunkwan University is actively improving its wireless network
With the COVID-19 pandemic, many schools began to resume face-to-face classes last year, and are conducting online non-face-to-face and face-to-face classes at the same time. Now, almost all schools have started face-to-face classes for the new semester, and many students are gathering at school again. And the connection of college students who are accustomed to online life to school wireless networks through various devices such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones has also increased rapidly. It is difficult to expect satisfactory speed or quality with existing school networks, and complaints are accumulating among students.
I met Choi Hyung-ki, a software professor at Sungkyunkwan University (hereinafter referred to as Sungkyunkwan University), who is planning to solve students' complaints and expand to 5G specialized network projects due to the recent success of the wireless network improvement project.
"Sungkyunkwan University is taking the lead in creating an environment that increases students' satisfaction with school life with the aim of 'student success is school success'. Choi Hyung-ki, head of the Ministry of Information and Communication (hereinafter referred to as the head of the department), was in charge of the wireless network improvement project at Sungkyunkwan University's Humanities and Social Sciences Campus (hereinafter referred to as HR Cam).
The introduction, improvement, and expansion of new systems in educational institutions are not as easy as expected than in general companies, especially, it is a big obstacle. Choi reportedly was worried about the budget when he submitted a plan to promote the wireless network improvement project to the school last year. However, the school said that when students are satisfied with campus life, it is important to increase student satisfaction above all else because the academic effect improves.
Sungkyunkwan University wanted to improve quickly after finding out that students were dissatisfied with the wireless LAN speed of the HR Cam Central Academic Information Center in a survey of students and "Everytime," a school life community of more than 400 universities nationwide.
What is most needed for the Central Academic Information Center, which has seen a surge in network traffic
Director Choi said, "Sungkyunkwan University has a well-established wired network infrastructure. The wired infrastructure is well established not only in each classroom but also in student convenience facilities, so there is no major inconvenience in using the wired network for not only faculty members but also students. It prepared for post-pandemic preparations in advance and also planned to improve the network environment due to the increase in the utilization rate of contents with a large amount of data such as video and audio. However, after the pandemic, network traffic surged as students used at least three devices per person at school, including laptops, tablets, and smartphones, as well as various wearable devices. It was difficult to handle with the existing wireless network, and students' complaints accumulated," he said, explaining why the wireless network needed to be improved.
The Sungkyunkwan University campus is divided into Insa Campus located in Jongno-gu, Seoul, and Natural Science Campus (hereinafter referred to as Jayu Campus) located in Suwon. Both campuses have libraries and academic information centers that help students conveniently live in school, with the Central Academic Information Center in the personnel cam and the Samsung Academic Information Center in the self-study cam.
The Central Academic Information Center in Seoul is a five-story building with a reading room, a preservation library, a cafeteria on the first floor, and an overseas data room, a study room, a special data room, a studio, and second and third libraries on the second floor. On the third floor, there are 22 student amenities necessary for library use, including media lab, humanities information team, loan return zone, information counseling room, copy room, writing clinic, and education room. On the fourth floor, there are domestic archives, study rooms, assignment books, and children's books.
There are many facilities that function as libraries and student reading culture centers, and the reading room on the first floor is available from 6 a.m. to 5 a.m. the next day, so the Central Academic Library is the place where the most students enter. In other words, wireless network usage is also high.
In addition, most IT technical support personnel are deployed to self-cam, and when network problems occur, they visit the place of the building one by one to solve them, which delayed solving the problem. Therefore, it was necessary to know and solve this quickly.
Piling Wireless Network Complaints Resolved with Cisco Meraki Wi-Fi 6E Switches and APs
Sungkyunkwan University's Central Academic Information Center Wireless LAN Improvement Project began in July last year to resolve student complaints about wireless LAN speed delays and multiple access, and was built and completed quickly for about six and a half months until the end of January this year. With the content of "Building a Wi-Fi 6E-based wireless LAN infrastructure at the Central Academic Information Center," it replaced equipment of seven Cisco switches and 85 APs, established a cloud wireless LAN management system, and upgraded the backbone OS.
Director Choi said, "Compared to existing Wi-Fi 5, consistent and stable performance and throughput have improved in many terminal environments due to increased demand for high-quality, large-capacity educational content and continuous increase in the number of wireless terminals." In addition, 6GHz frequency bands other than 2.4GHz/5GHz channels can be added to provide more channels than before, and when using 80MHz channels according to user needs, it will be able to expand from 4 channels based on Wi-Fi6 to 14 channels based on Wi-Fi6E."
One of the concerns of most IT system operators and managers is the efficiency of operations. In response to this, Director Choi said, "The existing legacy method is to purchase and manage wireless controllers directly, and in the event of a WLC failure, the entire wireless service in the school was disrupted." Cisco's Meraki system is cloud-based, making it easy to remotely manage wireless controllers from the outside anytime, anywhere. This project will reduce the cost of purchasing wireless controllers and solve the problem of service down due to equipment failures, he stressed.
The Cisco Meraki Switch features centralized management, enterprise-class security documents, application visibility and control, virtual stacking, routing and redundancy, and remote implementation tools and alarms. The switch introduced at Sungkyunkwan University is Cisco's first case of Wi-Fi 6E construction in Korea. It is suitable for implementing the next-generation AP infrastructure environment by supporting up to 5G Link/UPoE as well as more switching capacity and various interfaces compared to existing switches at 640 Gbps speed. In addition, AP equipment has improved all functions such as 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ac2/ax, 1x100M/1G/2.5G/5G multi-gigabit Ethernet, up to 7.78 Gbps, 20, 40, 80, 160 MHz channels, and can use stable and fast networks.
The Trinity of 'Products, Partners, and Customers' Leads the Project Success
System introduction and deployment projects are not all successful. However well planned the project, the project is often disrupted by unforeseen circumstances, such as product failure, failure to deliver properly, system-built companies breaking delivery times, or customers demanding too much.
Director Choi said, "This project was successfully built in a short period of time, with three factors: Cisco's excellent product and rapid supply, school information service's careful inspection of communication density and facilities throughout the Central Academic Information Center, and the establishment of a system with Snet system."
Sungkyunkwan University's wireless LAN improvement project began in July last year, but the start was not smooth. First of all, at a time when students need to quickly solve their network environment improvement, global supply chain problems arise and wireless LAN equipment is introduced Even so, they had to wait at least one to two years. After considering several systems, it was said that Cisco's Muraki, which could be supplied the fastest among them, was selected for good system performance, stable, and scalable. The system supply was also made within six months, so there was no disruption to the project's progress schedule.
"The school's information and communication office also checked the communication bandwidth of the central academic information center one by one and calculated the amount of use in order to install an efficient system according to the communication density. The Central Academic Information Center has a wide variety of facilities, and the frequency and usage of network access are very different for each floor. Therefore, it is necessary to know the exact figures for this so that the system can be properly deployed. In addition, students had to plan to install APs considering that the replacement time for smartphones and portable devices was short. This part took the most time to proceed with the actual project. "If this part is not done properly, the meaning of introducing the system may decrease," Choi said, which sounds like an advice that if customers do not understand their situation properly, they will waste only their budget.