Expo 2020 is a global event that is taking place in Dubai from October 2021 through March 2022. It is the first World Expo hosted in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia (MEASA) region with approximately 192 countries participating. The Expo site extends across 4.38 square kilometres, with hundreds of buildings including exhibition centres, hotels, parks, international participant pavilions, restaurants, and residential buildings.
As the Official Digital Network Partner of Expo 2020 Dubai, Cisco worked very closely with the Expo 2020 team, stakeholders, and partners to complete the network design. The outcome is a secure, scalable, flexible, highly available and resilient network infrastructure that can support thousands of endpoints and millions of visitors over the six-month period. Cisco Software-Defined Access (Cisco SD-Access) plays a key role as the networking technology for this hyper-connected mega event.
Designing a network for such a large event, with the ability to adapt to the many varied requirements from the exhibiting countries, is no small feat and comes with high expectations and many challenges. Let’s start by explaining the key requirements, followed by the design, and observed benefits.
Key Networking Requirements to Support Mega Events
Designing a large campus network for such a mega event has its own unique challenges. The journey started with collecting requirements encompassing wired and wireless endpoints, virtualization, IoT, and segmentation for security.
The Network Design
With the key requirements in mind, Cisco designed the Expo2020 network using Cisco Software Defined Access (SD-Access) technology. SD-Access multi-site topology provides high scalability enabling thousands of switches within a single campus network spanning the entire Expo site covering both indoor and outdoor areas. Multi-site design reduces the size of failure domains, which are limited to a single site with redundancy and resiliency focused on each site.
Modular network design is used across the Expo site with fully redundant devices, links, and power supplies to ensure high availability, increased scalability, and optimum performance. StackWise Virtual is used on Cisco Catalyst switches to increase redundancy and resiliency.
The SD-Access fabric also provides network virtualization for hosting multiple networks such as IT, IoT, Event, Guest, Media, and Broadcast using the same physical switches. Using macro- and micro-segmentation to virtually segment the network avoids creating and managing separate physical networks.
Cisco Catalyst high performance 100 Gigabit Ethernet switches are used for connecting SD-Access fabric network as Layer-3 and Layer-2 Borders, thus enabling flexible Layer-2 and Layer-3 connectivity to-and-from the fabric.
Network design supports a wide range of IT and IoT endpoints, with Layer-2 flooding enabled for Building Management System (BMS), Dante protocol for Background Music (BGM), and Multicast Support for IPTV traffic. Application Policies are deployed to provide Quality of Service (QoS) for Video and Voice traffic.
Cisco Industrial Ethernet switches extend the SD-Access fabric into harsh external environments, enabling reliable network connectivity to outdoor areas. These hardened switches act as SD-Access extended nodes to provide authentication, multicast, and security features to IoT endpoints.