Copyright 1997 CAUSE. From CAUSE/EFFECT Volume 20, Number 2, Summer 1997, pp. 4-7. Permission to copy or disseminate all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for commercial advantage, the CAUSE copyright and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of CAUSE, the association for managing and using information resources in higher education. To disseminate otherwise, or to republish, requires written permission. For further information, contact Julia Rudy at CAUSE, 4840 Pearl East Circle, Suite 302E, Boulder, CO 80301 USA; 303-939-0308; e-mail: jrudy@cause.org
by Ted Hanss
The Internet2 Project, a consortium effort of over 100 universities, is investing in upgrading campus and national network platforms for such application areas as digital libraries, collaboration environments, tele-medicine, and distance-independent instruction. This article provides a brief overview of the project, details issues that the project application effort intends to address, and outlines how you and your institution can get involved.
The Internet2 Project mission is to "facilitate and coordinate the development, deployment, operation, and technology transfer of advanced, network-based applications and network services to further U.S. leadership in research and higher education and accelerate the availability of new services and applications on the Internet." The emphasis of the project is on more than fast data rates. Internet2 will provide new network functionality through differentiated levels of service. Quality-of-service functionality will lead application developers to enhance current applications and create applications that were not previously possible. Internet2 (I2) will ensure, on an end-to-end basis, that applications have the network resources they require. However, the broadest goal goes beyond building a network or deploying individual applications -- we seek to establish a distributed knowledge system for achieving innovations in research, teaching, and learning.
Internet2 is driven by its charter members, consisting primarily of research universities. In addition, not-for-profit affiliates, government agencies, and industry members participate in I2. While focused on U.S. needs, the I2 project works closely with related international efforts to help build a common, global approach to advancing networked applications for research and education.
Many of the same participants were involved in the NSFnet project through the '80s and early '90s. After NSFnet was privatized, a series of planning meetings focused on the needs of higher education: Would the commercial Internet be able to meet the demands of leading universities? The feeling was that for commodity Internet services, the market was investing appropriately in building and deploying infrastructure. However, the needs of the research and education community went beyond the functionality of the Internet as defined in the mid-'90s. With over 3,000 U.S. Internet service providers focused on meeting the exponential demand for Internet connectivity, the higher education community needed to take the lead in moving Internet functionality to the next level.
In October of 1996, thirty-four universities attended a meeting at which the Internet2 Steering Committee1 (established earlier in the year) described the objectives of the project; all of the universities in attendance committed to moving the project forward. Shortly thereafter President Clinton and Vice President Gore announced the administration's Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative. The Internet2 Project has responsibility for Goal 1(a) of the NGI goals (see sidebar below), and is a key participant in addressing the other goals.
By January of 1997, more than 100 universities had joined Internet2. Committing to I2 means investing locally to build applications and upgrade the campus networking infrastructure and contributing toward the central project effort. Each I2 member institution appoints an executive point of contact, an applications lead, and an engineering lead.2
The universities that have joined the project to date have faculty and researchers with leading-edge needs for early access to Internet2 functionality, as well as the institutional ability to fund the necessary network upgrades and applications development. Thus it is a self-selecting group of universities with pressing demands for advanced networked applications who will benefit initially from I2.
Colleges and universities and other organizations with less immediate needs for I2 applications and services, who are not participating in the early investment, will benefit as well. A key objective of I2 is accelerating the technology transfer necessary to move the appropriate new technologies into the commercial marketplace, thus creating the basis of next-generation services available to all sectors of society. However, it is not necessary to wait for integration of Internet2 services into the commodity Internet for all institutions to benefit. The Internet2 Project will also share its experiences and expertise on an ongoing basis with others in the education community and beyond. Through publications, presentations (at CAUSE conferences, for example), and workshops and focus groups open to non-members, the I2 Project will provide updates and interaction with a wide community of interest.
This overall approach characterized development of the first Internet and it can work again today. In the late 1980s, approximately 100 universities participated in NSFnet. Within three years, NSFnet access extended across higher education. The Internet2 Project is establishing the structures to repeat this process.
Over the past decade, federal government R&D agencies, the higher education community, and private companies have worked together to develop many of today's Internet technologies. That partnership created a multi-billion-dollar industry. By renewing this partnership, Internet2 will develop and implement new technology needed by all network users, ensuring continued U.S. leadership in research and education.
The focus of Internet2 is on enabling applications. It isn't possible to forecast all the applications we will see, but a sample of what we're working on today will give a flavor for the future:
There is not a straightforward route to these new applications -- we will rely on serendipity and the creative abilities of faculty, researchers, staff, and students on our campuses. There is much we don't know yet about user needs, much less what is technically possible. Therefore, it's most useful at this time to describe the areas we intend to explore in the project.
Quality of Service. A necessary investigation is defining user requirements for quality of service (QoS). Audio/video services may require bandwidth reservation, electronic commerce must have transactional guarantees, collaborative applications demand real-time services, and so on. Dependability and reliability are critical quality parameters for all applications. Are these all that we need? More than we need? And what is the appropriate level of quality of service? For example, is "best effort" (today's Internet capability) versus "guaranteed QoS" a binary choice or a graduated scale? More choice provides greater flexibility, but perhaps differentiated service levels need to evolve over time given current router performance.
Network-Aware Applications. Today, applications are typically not aware of any attributes of the underlying network. Can we create network-aware, adaptive applications that adjust their functionality as network conditions change? How do applications determine they are getting the QoS requested? As we assume the Internet Protocol (IP) as a common bearer service, what emerging IP extensions can applications exploit (e.g., the resource reservation protocol, RSVP, and IPv6) and what further extensions must be made? Stable application programmer interfaces must be defined to assist application developers in accessing necessary QoS features.
High Fidelity Audio and Video. Standards-based transport services for streaming audio and video are emerging. However, a proliferation of proprietary encoding schemes will lead to needing different client packages to access content from multiple sources. The Internet2 Project should explore non-proprietary approaches to encoding video/audio content at high data rates.
Tools. Many of the utilities we use today were developed with assumptions of congested networks with small maximum transmission units. For example, researchers using very large data sets have identified improvements in the file transfer protocol (FTP) as a place where a relatively small investment could result in large productivity gains.
Collaboration Infrastructure. To build effective collaboration environments, we must address mediating control among participants, displaying arbitrary content on any screen with whiteboard overlay, synchronizing data streams, and session record and playback. Industry may address some of these challenges. However, the higher education community could focus on its interests, including integrating control of remote scientific instruments.
Multicast. The goal of efficient delivery of data to wide audiences through multicast is understood and valued. However, much work remains to make multicast a viable, productive mechanism for one-to-many and many-to-many applications. Many engineering challenges related to routing and management must be addressed. Another area for exploration is use of wireless (e.g., satellite) delivery of multicast streams. There are also opportunities for the I2 Project to sponsor content streams. This might include establishing "channels" for publishing not just audio and video content of interest to the higher education community, but such lower bandwidth content as environment-sensing data.
Infrastructure Components. Internet2 is not intended to solve current Internet problems. However, barriers remain to deploying advanced applications. Security is a critical distributed systems component, along with directory services and electronic commerce. Inter-realm authentication is needed to deploy digital library applications accessible across institutions. In addition to the technical challenges, there are policy issues for which I2 could be a testbed. For example, what are the most appropriate costing and charging schemes for reserving particular quality-of-service attributes?
Exploiting GigaPoPs. The topology of the I2 network includes GigaPoPs -- gigabit capacity points of presence -- which serve as regional aggregation points. GigaPoPs improve traffic efficiency through local packet exchange, but they also provide a location for caching or replicating servers for Web, database, and file systems access. For example, digital video content for asynchronous learning may be staged at GigaPoP-based servers, and GigaPoPs could host local down- and up-link satellite facilities providing economical, nationwide multicast delivery of telemetry data, audio and video streams, etc.
Scaling. A distributed environment with international applications connectivity must support large numbers of simultaneous users per application and millions of users overall. Thus, we must undertake application-level modeling efforts with such inputs as user behavior, quality-of-service attributes, and caching strategies. The modeling will consider the number of simultaneous users per application and the number of simultaneous applications per campus and per GigaPoP. From this, we can refine the design of applications and set expectations for the growth of network capacity.
User Interfaces. The above issues focus on exploiting lower layers for enhanced applications functionality. The user interface, though, will be the critical test of success. Do users establish their own preferences for quality of service? If so, how is it presented? What are the user perception issues for dynamically adjusted QoS? Information visualization research is key to deploying enhanced digital libraries. Collaboration-enabled applications require investigations into shared work tools, while tele-immersion adds the challenge of how to simulate realistic shared presence.
The application area priorities for 1997 are identifying requirements for quality of service and establishing a demonstration showcase for exemplary I2 applications. A number of other goals are forecast for the first three years of the project (see sidebar). While some of these goals are quite aggressive, they provide a sense of the initial priorities of the effort.
Internet2 will have a physical, production network that allows for application experimentation. That is, the network will be a stable and reliable platform for application developers. Regional affiliations of universities will come together at the GigaPoPs mentioned above. The initial interconnect network for the GigaPoPs is the NSF-supported, MCI-provided very-high-speed backbone network service (vBNS). The vBNS today runs at OC12 rates (622 megabits/second). Most universities will connect at OC3 (155 megabits/second), with some connecting at T3 and others up to OC12.
The network engineering effort has a set of principles that illustrate the applied, versus basic, research aspects of the physical network:
If you're already a project member, there are two major components to readying your campus for Internet2. First is supporting faculty and other developers of advanced applications. These will include investing money and people in local applications development, joint development with other members, and participating in project working groups exploring the issues described above. The project will identify applications that illustrate the potential for I2 through demonstration, and that provide a basis for exploring open technical issues.
The second component is upgrading the campus's physical network to support inter-institutional, end-to-end broadband connectivity for these new applications. The specific requirements for the campus network are the responsibility of the campus and are not determined by the project.
If your campus is not a member of the Internet2 Project, you will probably want to follow the various I2 activities as they evolve in the coming year, learning from your colleagues' experiences and adapting your own campus plans accordingly. The official Internet2 Web site at http://www.internet2.edu/ offers many documents, status reports, and presentations that can keep you up to date about Internet2 activities. Information is also available about joining the Internet2 initiative, should your campus wish to participate at the membership level.
By exploring these applications issues in a production-focused environment, we hope to identify the best practices and best applications that will meet the needs of the higher education community today and in the future. We also intend to focus heavily on effective technology transfer. We will not succeed if we've created a network just for colleges and universities. As with NSFnet, our success will come by the universal adoption of I2 functionality by the business and consumer markets as well.
(a) The networks developed under the NGI Initiative will connect at least 100 NGI sites-universities, federal research institutions, and other research partners-at speeds 100 times faster than today's Internet.
(b) The NGI networks will connect on the order of ten NGI sites at speeds 1,000 times faster than the current Internet.
The NGI initiative should develop and demonstrate all the advanced network service technologies needed to support next-generation applications.
A fundamental objective for the NGI is to demonstrate a wide variety of nationally important applications that cannot be achieved over today's Internet.
1 Internet2 Steering Committee members include Gary Augustson (chair), Pennsylvania State University; Bill Graves, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Greg Jackson, University of Chicago; Raman Khanna, Stanford University; Stuart Lynn, University of California Office of the President; and Doug Van Houweling, University of Michigan.
2 Currently supporting these individuals are the six Internet2 project staff: Mike Roberts, acting project director; Ted Hanss, director of applications development; Guy Almes, chief engineer; Heather Boyles, director of administration; Karla Roberson, membership director; Greg Wood, director of communications; and Ann O'Beay, director of corporate relations.
Ted Hanss (ted@umich.edu)
is Director of Applications Development for the Internet2 Project (on loan
from the University of Michigan).
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