New productivity of future campuses: enlightenment from the campus network upgrade and reconstruction of Nanjing Jiangbei New District Pukou Foreign Language School

The rapid development of information technology has deeply integrated smart teaching with our teaching process, forming a teaching model that integrates teaching and evaluation. At Pukou Foreign Language School, we have built an efficient and accurate closed-loop teaching cycle through pre-class learning strategies, in-class interactive teaching systems, and post-class homework data analysis. Imagine that before class, we assign preview tasks and use the homework platform system to analyze students' answer data to accurately grasp students' knowledge reserves; during class, we use the teaching system and answer sheets for real-time interaction to understand students' mastery of classroom knowledge points in real time; after class, we collect all homework data, evaluate learning effects, and provide important references for the design of the next class. This is our daily life, an efficient and accurate teaching cycle.

Faced with the challenges of the rapid development of information technology, we are committed to continuously optimizing the tools and processes of precision teaching to reduce the burden and increase efficiency. We plan to equip each class and each group with tablet devices to replace the answering machines that can only collect objective questions, strengthen classroom interaction; combine AI technology, introduce diverse and innovative teaching applications, enrich teaching methods, and enhance the learning experience.

The development of precision teaching has put forward higher requirements for campus networks. To this end, we have launched the upgrade and transformation of the campus all-optical network to create a new generation of smart campus all-optical network to meet the needs of future teaching applications.

Press the “restart button” for network planning

Looking back at the original intention of this all-optical network transformation project, back in 2012, the campus infrastructure project simultaneously completed the initial construction of the campus wired network. However, in recent years, with the development of the school's teaching business and the continuous advancement of "artificial intelligence + education", the original campus network infrastructure is facing severe challenges:

• Cable aging

In terms of wired network, the wired network deployed at the same time as the school was established has been in operation for more than ten years. The network equipment is outdated and failures occur frequently. At the same time, there are not enough outdoor transmission optical cable resources to achieve 10G expansion; there are not enough indoor network ports to support business expansion needs such as smart teaching, and rewiring faces the practical problems of bridges and space constraints.

Take the construction of the electronic class sign as an example. In order to add multimedia equipment and electronic class signs to each class, we had to carry out tedious rewiring work. However, the capacity of the bridge is limited and the space is also stretched. Especially for a large school like ours with more than 100 classes, it is undoubtedly a daunting challenge. Various troubles followed one after another, and the masters in charge of the construction had to work continuously for a long time, and often got into trouble because the network cable could not pass through, the interface location was unclear, or the power wiring problem.

• Wireless is missing

In terms of wireless networks, the wireless networks deployed in batches only covered offices and some public areas. When we started to build a smart campus in 2017, we found that the lack of wireless coverage in the classroom had become a serious bottleneck restricting the use of smart teaching equipment, and it was impossible to achieve an integrated layout of wired and wireless in the future construction of a smart campus.

• Weak operation and maintenance

In terms of operation and maintenance, due to insufficient wired points and insufficient wireless coverage, privately pulling network cables often occurs, causing network loops and other problems. Schools usually lack dedicated operation and maintenance personnel, and network operation and maintenance are all handled by information technology teachers. They have to deal with frequent network problems caused by outdated equipment and IP conflicts at the same time, which is very stressful.

The urgent need for network transformation and upgrading has made us determined to overcome current difficulties, focus on future development, and press the "restart button" for network planning and construction.

Choose flexible and efficient "Ether Color Light"

We have identified three major goals in re-planning and building the campus network:

• The first is to improve bandwidth capabilities. With the development of "AI + Education", the requirements for campus network bandwidth, speed and latency are increasing day by day, especially for high-traffic applications such as recording classrooms, synchronous classrooms, VR virtual laboratories, smart classrooms, and artificial intelligence laboratories. Upgrading and transformation must solve the problem of insufficient bandwidth while replacing the old ones.

• The second is to support business development. In the future, cloud computing, big data, the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence and other technologies will continue to be integrated into the teaching system and become a normalized teaching method. The development of new businesses will lead to the expansion of business locations. Every classroom and office must quickly launch new businesses.

• In addition, we need to resolve the difficulties of operation and maintenance. As the daily basic work of campus network, operation and maintenance must quickly locate the root cause of the failure when it occurs, reduce the failure time and reduce the workload of operation and maintenance personnel.

In response to these goals, we conducted an overall analysis of information construction in combination with the guiding opinions on the construction of Nanjing educational equipment in the 14th Five-Year Plan, and clarified several needs: First, build an all-optical network with low latency and high bandwidth to meet the bandwidth development needs in the context of the digital transformation of education in the next 5-10 years; second, deploy optical fiber into rooms to make business expansion more flexible and improve the efficiency of business launch; third, unified management, deploy the management platform to the server room of the Education Bureau, and regional administrators and school administrators operate and maintain it at the same time to avoid safety accidents caused by equipment failure.

After rigorous research and screening, and expert discussion, we finally decided to fully adopt Ruijie Network's flexible and efficient minimalist Ethernet color optical network solution to achieve our goal of upgrading and transforming our campus all-optical network.

Using a minimalist Ethernet color light solution, we renovated and upgraded all 260 classrooms and offices in the school. Thanks to the support of Ethernet color light technology, the network architecture implements a core-access two-layer architecture. The core-side equipment transmits 8 pairs of optical signals of different wavelengths in one optical fiber, replacing the previous 8 optical fibers, effectively saving trunk optical cable resources. Passive transparent convergence equipment is used in the weak current room to reduce equipment failure nodes. On the access side, switches are deployed in the room, and optical fibers are directly connected to the classroom to achieve 1:1 bandwidth access to the room. Downlink access to IP devices in the classroom and office, such as AP, computers, telephones, monitoring, etc., achieves full network coverage of wired and wireless points. Finally, through a unified management platform, management and monitoring of all network devices are achieved.

Core switch deployment

Deployment of core computer rooms Deployment of weak current rooms in buildings Deployment of classrooms/offices

Bringing new vitality to smart teaching

In light of the actual situation of the school, the full-optical upgrade and reconstruction of our campus network is aimed at existing precision teaching and future teaching scenarios, which will provide a more solid digital foundation support for us to unleash new vitality in smart teaching.

After the project is completed, our all-optical campus network will fully meet the bandwidth requirements of business development, business expansion will be more flexible, and operation and maintenance management efficiency will be improved. From our intuitive experience, the all-optical network upgrade and transformation has brought us new experiences in three aspects.

•First, by adopting the minimalist Ethernet color optical network, our core computer rooms and equipment rooms have become cleaner and less noisy, and the number of equipment rooms has been reduced from one on each floor of the teaching building to one in each building.

•Secondly, the minimalist Ethernet color optical network does demonstrate good scalability and flexibility. At present, the switches deployed in our classrooms have 8 ports. In addition to electronic class signs, digital broadcasting, multimedia and wireless AP, 4 ports are reserved. It will be more convenient to add new equipment and new applications required for smart teaching in the future.

• In sharp contrast, network operation and maintenance work is in sharp contrast. Previously, whenever a network failure occurred, we had to arrive at the site as soon as possible, first confirm whether there were any problems with the computer, hardware, and office routers, and then find the switch interface to troubleshoot the problem. If our part-time operation and maintenance teacher happened to have classes, it would delay troubleshooting time. Now, according to the feedback from our operation and maintenance teachers, using the intelligent operation and maintenance management platform in Ruijie Network's minimalist optical solution, we can quickly find and lock which port has a problem, greatly improving operation and maintenance efficiency.

Through the successful practice of upgrading and renovating the campus all-optical network, we are more convinced that with the digital transformation of education, high-speed and stable all-optical networks will become the new quality productivity of future campuses. In the all-optical network, "colorful light" will also shine in the campus network with its unique advantages.