TaiWan Advanced Research & Education Network (TWAREN) began as an initiative under Taiwanese government’s "Challenge 2008" program. It is also part of the comprehensive Six-year National Development Plan formulated by Taiwanese government in 2002. The National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC) was responsible for planning, designing, and establishing the next generation research and education network, TWAREN. TWAREN will to be Taiwan's new entry to the world of 10Gbps-based advanced R&D networks. At the time, there were only a few such networks in its genre.
TWAREN, a five-year project (2003-2007), is the successor of TANet2 (a.k.a Taiwan Research Network) which was funded by the National Science Council (NSC) in 1998 and constructed by NCHC. TWAREN’s network construction was completed at the end of 2003 and started its operation and service in the beginning of 2004. Taiwan Academic Network (TANet) has started to use TWAREN’s domestic backbone to serve its over 1,000 elementary schools, junior and senior high schools of since March 2005. In order to further enhance the reliability, TWAREN’s backbone architecture has evolved in the following years to include more redundancy. In 2016, TWAREN’s 100G backbone has been operational. This is a great leap in TWAREN history not only because the significant bump in bandwidth, but also its first incorporation of dark fiber and SDN technology in its underlying architecture. With vastly increasing bandwidth and a large number of networked institutions, TWAREN will be the foundation for further innovation and creation.
TWAREN is not just a network infrastructure for general production traffic but also an integrated platform for network research and big data science. Besides the development of network technologies and applications such as performance measurement, IPv6, multicast and MPLS. TWAREN provides a SDN testbed for domestic researchers to have direct SDN accessibility with each other and with international partners.