General information about the Internet II Project


At a meeting in Chicago on October 1, representatives of the thirty-four universities attending agreed unanimously to endorse the goals of the project, committed their institutions to finding the resources necessary to participate in the project, and pledged initial funding to enable current intensive planning efforts to proceed without delay. As of October 8, three additional charter members have joined.

Five working committees were formed, and chairs appointed as noted below. The committee chairs will comprise an interim steering committee while a permanent project organization is formed and staffed. Gary Augustson of Penn St has agreed to chair the steering committee in order to maintain good coordination with the Educom Networking and Telecommunications Task Force, whose steering committee he also chairs.

It was agreed that charter membership in the project will remain open for a limited time for additional institutions who are in a position to commit the resources necessary for participation.

The current draft of the project charter statement and list of members is appended. Additional informaion may be obtained from any of the individuals listed below.

Internet II Project working committees

Steering Committee Chair - Gary Augustson (Penn St) [jga@psu.edu]
Applications - Bill Graves (UNC), Chair [Bill_Graves@unc.edu]
Engineering - Greg Jackson (Chicago), Chair [g-jackson@uchicago.edu]
Charter and Goals - Raman Khanna (Stanford) [khanna@jessica.stanford.edu]
Organization - Stuart Lynn (UC), Chair [mslynn@ucop.edu]
Search - Doug Van Houweling (Michigan), Chair [dvh@umich.edu]
Project Director (Acting) - Mike Roberts (Educom) [roberts@educom.edu]


Updated 10/8/96

INTERNET II PROJECT

SUMMARY

Building on the tremendous success of the last ten years in generalizing and adapting research Internet technology to academic needs, a number of universities (see list at end of this document) are now joining together with government and industry partners to accelerate the next stage of Internet development in academia. The Internet II project, as it is known, will bring focus, energy and resources to the development of a new family of advanced applications to meet emerging academic requirements in research, teaching and learning.

The project will address major challenges of the next generation of university networks. First and most importantly, a leading edge network capability for the national research community will be created and sustained. For a number of years beginning in 1987, the network services of NSFnet were unequaled anywhere else. But the privatization of that network and the frequent congestion of its commercial replacement have deprived many faculty of the network capability needed to support world class research. This unintended result has had a significant negative impact on the university research community.

Second, network development efforts will be directed to enabling a new generation of applications that fully exploit the capabilities of broadband networks - media integration, interactivity, real time collaboration - to name a few. This work is essential if new priorities within higher education for support of national research objectives, distance education, lifelong learning, and related efforts are to be fulfilled.

Third, the work of the Internet II project will be integrated with ongoing efforts to improve production Internet services for all members of the academic community. A major goal of the project is to rapidly transfer new network services and applications to all levels of educational use and to the broader Internet community, both nationally and internationally.

SCOPE OF INTERNET II PROJECT

The project will be conducted in phases over the next three to five years, with initial participation expected from fifty to one hundred universities, a number of federal agencies, and many of the leading computer and telecommunications firms, including IBM, Cisco Systems, AT&T, MCI, and Sun. The overall project technical plan and architecture is contained in a companion document to this statement entitled "Internet II Architecture."

In the initial project phase, end to end broadband network services will be established among the participating universities. On a parallel basis, applications design will commence using teams of university faculty, researchers, and industry experts. It is expected that within approximately eighteen months, "beta" versions of a number of applications will be in operation among the Internet II participating universities.

INTERNET II PARTNERSHIP & FUNDING ARRANGEMENTS

In most respects, the partnership and funding arrangements for the Internet II project will parallel those of previous joint networking efforts, of which the NSFnet project is a very successful example. Industry partners will work with campus-based and regional university teams to create the advanced network services that are necessary to meet the requirements of broadband, networked applications. Federal R&D agencies will provide grant support in their areas of program interest, such as the NSF vBNS meritorious high performance networking initiative.

Funding for the Internet II project will include both financial and in kind services and products of various types that will be necessary for the project. Since most of the project effort will occur on or near university campuses, it is anticipated that the majority of funding from government research agencies and industry partners will be in the form of grants to the participating universities.

Internet II Project Charter University Members (as of 10/1/96)

University of Arizona
Arizona State University
California State University
Univ of California System
Univ of California - Berkeley
Univ of California - Davis
Carnegie Mellon University
Case Western Reserve
University of Chicago
Colorado State University
University of Colorado
Cornell University
Emory University
George Washington Univ
Harvard University
University of Illinois-UC
Indiana University
University of Iowa
MIT
Michigan State University
University of Michigan
University of Minnesota
University of Nebraska
Northwestern University
University of North Carolina
Ohio State University
Pennsylvania State University
University of Pennsylvania
Princeton University
Purdue University
Stanford University
Vanderbilt University
Virginia Tech
University of Virginia
University of Washington
University of Wisconsin
Yale University

Version 1.1

9/16/96

Internet II Architecture


INTRODUCTION

This technical overview of the proposed architecture for the Internet II project was created by a working group composed of Scott Bradner (Harvard University), Scott Brim (Cornell University), Steve Corbato (Univ of Washington), Russ Hobby (Univ of Calif - Davis), and David Wasley (Univ of California System), with contributions from many other individuals, including in particular a presentation by Professor Larry Landweber of the University of Wisconsin at a workshop in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in July 1996.

It is intended to be a working document and will be updated as the Internet II project evolves.

INTERNET II PROJECT

The Internet II project is a collaborative effort among a number of universities, federal R&D agencies, and private sector firms to develop a next generation Internet for research and education, including both enhanced network services as well as the multimedia applications which will be enabled by those services. The work is developmental and pre- competitive in nature. It is is more fully described in a companion document to this technical overview.

OBJECTIVES

The technical objectives of Internet II include:

APPLICATIONS REQUIREMENTS

In a number of technical meetings and workshops over the past several years, faculty members and other university representatives have identified a set of advanced applications that will greatly enrich teaching, learning, collaboration and research activities. A major impediment to the realization of these applications is lack of advanced communications services. The broad use of distance learning will require selectable quality of service and efficient "one-to-many" data transport in support of multimedia and shared information processing. To support world class research on a continuing basis, the academic community requires high capacity and selectable quality of service to make effective use of national laboratories, computational facilities and large data repositories.

NETWORK SERVICES

Internet II is designed to provide a variety of services "on demand" in support of advanced applications. These dynamically selectable services will include guaranteed bounded delay, low data loss, and high capacity. For example, in order to support delivery of advanced multimedia teaching materials from a digital library repository to a dispersed audience of learners, it will be necessary for the service delivery infrastructure to support "multicast" data delivery with guaranteed upper bounds within the transport components on delay and data loss.

New protocols to enable this functionality have already been defined and will be deployed early in the Internet-II project. These protocols include the IETF defined quality of service protocols such as RSVP and RTP along with IPv6, the IETF-developed replacement for the version of IP that is in current use on the Internet. In addition, Internet-II will provide access to the underlying network infrastructure for those environments that can support that access and for those applications that can make use of specific capabilities offered by the infrastructure.

IMPLEMENTATION

At the heart of the Internet-II design is a new technology for providing advanced communications services. The technology, referred to as a GigaPOP, is a complex of technologies developed over the first decade of the Internet integrated with new technologies developed by vendors and the Internet Engineering community. The Internet-II project will demonstrate proof of concept of this new set of technologies and services so that they can become the basis for the next generation of commercial Internet service offerings.

The GigaPOP is the point of interconnection and service delivery between one or more institutional members of the Internet-II development project and one or more service providers. Typical institutional connections will be made via ATM or SONET services at very high bandwidth. The fundamental advance represented by the GigaPOP architecture is dynamically acquired "quality of service" in support of a broad range of new applications while maintaining a common interoperable "bearer service". Service characteristics will include end-user definable capacity as well as latency. An essential part of the Internet-II project will be to determine the incremental costs associated with support of differentiated classes of service and to develop the mechanisms to collect data about the use of these resources by individual users.

The architecture of the GigaPOP also will support service delivery to regional or state-based not-for-profit consortia such as the Virginia Educational Network, the Washington State K-20 network, or the combined University of California and California State University system. It is envisioned that 20-30 GigaPOPs nationwide will comprise the Phase 1 deployment. These will be designed and managed collectively on behalf of the Internet-II project community.

Equipment at a GigaPOP site will include:

One or more wide area communications service providers will connect to the GigaPOPs in order to provide communications paths between the nationwide set of GigaPOPs and between GigaPOPs and the established commercial Internet. Thus, participating institutions will be able to acquire a wide variety of commercial as well as pre-competitive communications services over a single high capacity communications link to the nearest GigaPOP facility. In particular, to support high performance distance learning and remote collaboration initiatives, the GigaPOP architecture will facilitate local interconnectivity between the higher education community and those commercial providers offering emerging high-bandwidth home access technologies.

The most advanced applications will require a set of communications paths among the GigaPOPs that are engineered especially for the Internet-II project. It is essential that these interconnect pathways fully support the protocols and functions noted above. Recently, NSF has proposed an expanded role for its vBNS infrastructure that potentially could attach as many as 100 sites nationally to the current OC-3 backbone and could provide a deployment platform for emerging applications in support of research and collaboration. It is envisioned that the vBNS, with its proposed new capabilities, will be the initial interconnect network among the GigaPOPs. If the vBNS should prove insufficient for the full range of Internet-II requirements, other alternatives will be employed.

Although direct SONET pathways might be most effective in providing the inter-GigaPOP pathways, it seems most likely that ATM-over-SONET will be the most commonly available commercial service. Because Internet-II will use virtual connections within and between the GigaPOPs, a test network can be implemented along side of the production network without having to duplicate facilities. This test network will be used to experiment with new capabilities of the network itself where the production network can be used to provide reliable service for applications.

OPERATIONS

Clearly the design of the GigaPOPs must meet the requirements of very high reliability and availability. Each GigaPOP site will be physically secure and environmentally conditioned, including backup power and resistance to damage from acts of nature. Physically diverse fiber optic and wireless communications paths will maximize service robustness against the unlikely event of physical damage external to the site. In addition, the Internet-II infrastructure will be designed to be secure from the threats of those who would seek to disrupt its operations.

Not all GigaPOP sites will be staffed 24 hours per day. Instead, redundant Network Operations Centers will monitor the operation of all equipment remotely via both in-band and out-of-band circuits and will dispatch problem resolution staff as needed to effect restoration of normal services.

CONCLUSION

The Internet-II architecture has been chosen to demonstrate the effectiveness of new technologies in providing the next generation communications infrastructure. The success of Internet-II will allow higher education and research institutions to remain world leaders in the development of advanced applications of information technology.


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Updated: Thursday, November 14, 1996, 11:19 pm