Quantifying the Digital Divide: A Scientific Overview of Network Connectivity and Grid Infrastructure in South Asian Countries

The future of Computing in High Energy Physics (HEP) applications depends on both the Network and Grid infrastructure. South Asian countries such as India and Pakistan are making significant progress by building clusters as well as improving their network infrastructure However to facilitate the use of these resources, they need to manage the issues of network connectivity to be among the leading participants in Computing for HEP experiments. In this paper we classify the connectivity for academic and research institutions of South Asia. The quantitative measurements are carried out using the PingER methodology; an approach that induces minimal ICMP traffic to gather active end-to-end network statistics. The PingER project has been measuring the Internet performance for the last decade. Currently the measurement infrastructure comprises of over 700 hosts in more than 130 countries which collectively represents approximately 99% of the world's Internet-connected population. Thus, we are well positioned to characterize the world's connectivity. Here we present the current state of the National Research and Educational Networks (NRENs) and Grid Infrastructure in the South Asian countries and identify the areas of concern. We also present comparisons between South Asia and other developing as well as developed regions. We show that there is a strong correlation between the Network performance and several Human Development indices. Introduction The last decade has seen tremendous improvements in the Internet infrastructure with users experiencing, lower packet loss, Round Trip Times (RTT) and increased throughputs. PingER[1] measurements have been used for over a decade for monitoring Internet connectivity worldwide and more recently, the focus has shifted to the developing and under-developed regions, especially Africa and South Asia for the purpose of quantifying the Digital divide. In this paper we compare the network connectivity of South Asia with the rest of the world regions, performance of South Asian networks as seen from US and Europe, network routing within South Asian countries, Mean Opinion Score (MOS) [2] of South Asian Countries, current status of Network and Grid infrastructure in South Asian Countries and Comparison of Network performance with Human Development Indices. South Asia as Compared to the rest of the