JISC

Internet2 is a major development programme, funded by a consortium of universities, commercial suppliers and network service providers and run by the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID). It aims to create a world-leading, high performance network infrastructure for US higher education, and a range of leading-edge applications that take advantage of the opportunities that the new network offers.

The programme consists of:

• a high performance network, ABILENE, to act as a test-bed for new technologies, services and applications.
• a number of Working Groups addressing the development of Middleware, a range of new services that make this new, advanced functionality accessible to applications and users.
• a Working Group encouraging the development of new applications that will inform and take advantage of the developments in the other two main areas of work

There are strong links between Internet2 and other high performance, development networks funded by a range of US Government agencies.

Although membership of Internet2 is restricted to US institutions and commercial organisations, UCAID are keen to establish Memorandum of Understanding with international partners in order to test the new technologies across multiple networks.

Much of the work of Internet2 is relevant to the UK education community needs for advanced networking and applications and significant benefits will be obtained from exploiting opportunities for co-operative development and information sharing.

Internet 2 Goals

Internet 2 is a programme of activities that has been set up with the objective of recreating the leading edge research and education network that the USA enjoyed some years ago, before the phenomenal growth in Internet usage by commercial companies and the general public.

New, high speed technologies will be developed and proven on a new, high-speed network . A new range of products to manage the high speed network and provide services to users and new applications running across the network will be developed; these products are known collectively as Middleware.

The network will also be used by new applications, designed to take maximum advantage of improved network performance. Testing and developing these new programs is itself a major goal, and several novel applications are already under trial. Many of these are similar to those which were used in the SuperJANET demonstrations some years ago, although much more advanced, and several are exploring new opportunities that have only been made possible by greatly improved network performance.

Finally, the project seeks to transfer the technologies and expertise gained in the project into the production Internet service.

Within these broad goals some specific objectives have been set out:

• Develop applications which provide dramatically enhanced capabilities for collaboration between researchers who are scattered widely, and allow them to conduct experiments for example
• Demonstrate enhanced delivery of educational materials, and services in other areas such as health care, by taking advantage of the ‘virtual proximity' that better network infrastructure provides
• Develop and prove a range of middleware products to support the provision of electronic services across the network. These include security, e-commerce and a range of enhanced network management and monitoring applications
• Develop differentiated Quality of Service protocols based on the application requirements of audio, image and moving image delivery services
• Promote standards and collaboration to ensure common working practices across participating institutions and encourage partnerships with government and commercial organisations

The current projects and working groups that have been set up map closely to these specific objectives and are explained in some detail later.

Internet 2 Structure

Internet 2

The Internet 2 project itself has only a very few staff and most of the work is managed and coordinated by the UCAID organisation (see below) which was set up when the project really took off.

Begun in October 1996 by 34 US research universities, Internet2 today has over 140 member universities that are working with corporate and affiliate members. Only universities in the USA can become member universities. Member universities commit to providing resources to work in projects, to upgrading campus networks and to improving links to regional network nodes, known as GigaPoPs, so that they can participate in the various Internet 2 activities and projects.

Corporate partners support member universities through financial and other resources and through providing development effort. Affiliate members are generally providers of network equipment or services, and help develop the gigaPoPs.

Members therefore have to demonstrate considerable commitment to Internet 2 when they join. There are limited opportunities for organisations outside of the USA to become members unless they can provide commercial support; BT is one of the few examples that have done so.

Many of the programmes are being carried out by a series of working groups. They have been established to explore specific technical challenges related to enabling advanced network applications. Working group members include representatives from Internet2 universities, as well as affiliate and corporate members. Their areas of work are detailed in a later section.

UCAID

The University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development is a non-profit consortium, led by university members working in partnership with corporate and affiliate members, to provide leadership and direction for advanced networking development within the university community.

It has a broader remit than simply networking, although it has set up the Abilene network (see below). It runs Internet 2 activities, including the middleware and advanced application development projects and working groups.

Its staff are based in Washington DC, Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Armonk, New York. Most are on secondment from higher education institutions in the USA. UCAID's membership classes and restrictions on membership are similar to Internet 2. However UCAID are keen to establish Memorandum of Understanding with organisations outside the USA who have similar goals and wish to provide international test beds for applications and research. Four European network organisations, including UKERNA and TERENA, have signed MOU's with UCAID, as have Canadian and Singapore network organisations.

Internet 2 Network Developments

ABILENE

The ABILENE network is a key element of the programme and has been set up to support and encourage the development of advanced applications. The advanced, high bandwidth backbone network connects many regional aggregation points, termed gigaPoPs. Abilene is a long term project and current plans extend over the next five years. Its primary aims are to provide:

• A high availability backbone, by integrating advanced network services that are currently being developed
• A testbed for new network capabilities, including Quality of Service (QoS), multicasting and advanced security and authentication protocols
• A network research capability

Each of the above is described as a separate network' but it is not clear if this implies three separate test networks or whether Abilene provides a testbed for evaluation separate from the Internet as a whole. Carrying out QoS tests and network research simultaneously may be incompatible.

The topology of ABILENE is shown above (reproduced by kind permission of UCAID).

Peering with other high speed networks, such as the NSF vBNS network (see below), will be encouraged. ABILENE is also looking for partners outside of the USA so that QoS applications across multiple providers can be tested, and has signed MOU with a number of educational network providers in other countries. International links will be concentrated through the ‘Star-Tap' in Chicago.

The main commercial partners in the ABILENE network are Qwest, Nortel and Cisco. At present the network has a 2.4 Gb backbone, supporting links to individual institutions at 622 and 155 Mb. It is planned to upgrade the backbone to 9.6Gb during the life of the project and as soon as the technologies become available. Links to individual institutions will be upgraded in proportion to the improvements in backbone bandwidth.

Digital Video Network

The Internet2 Digital Video Network (I2-DVN) will establish a national higher education video network service to provide capabilities to support scalable and easy-to-use applications to deliver live or stored streaming and interactive high-quality digital video.

The I2-DVN will also research issues surrounding the licensing and distribution of content and is seeking to gather and store material suitable for use in courses, informal lectures, documentaries and video conferences among Internet2 member institutions. It also intends to develop archive and search capabilities for video libraries.

The service is a collaborative venture among several high performance network video initiatives including:

• iCAIR the International Centre for Advanced Internet Research
• the Research TV Consortium
• ViDe: the Southeastern Universities Research Association's Video Development Initiative

Internet2 Development Programme

Working Groups

Internet2 Working Groups are addressing the project-wide technical issues that will enable the development and deployment of the advanced applications that are intended to take advantage of the improved network performance. The Working Group membership includes representatives from the various university, corporate and affiliate members. It is important to recognise that, at present, all of the major development projects in Internet2, other than the Abilene network, are associated with the activities of one or other of the Working Groups.

The Internet2 Engineering Working Group is responsible for defining the general requirements of the Internet2 communications infrastructure, and suggesting architectures that may be suitable for future implementations.

Several of the Working Groups are looking into issues surrounding the development of Middleware. Middleware is the set of standards, interfaces and services which will enable new applications to be developed by making the advanced functionality of the network accessible. The Working Groups are moving forward in this area through a process which first involves establishing frameworks and creating ‘White Papers' for wide circulation and comment. The second stage creates a programme of projects that will develop and deploy suitable technologies and products. Internet2 is keen to work with international partners in these developments, and with commercial partners who have experience with e-Commerce applications.

The principal components of Middleware that Internet2 is developing are:

• Quality of Service (see Qbone above)
• Directory services
• Security services
• E-Commerce, including transaction systems and non-repudiation
• Search mechanisms
• Audio and Video Frameworks
• Application Program Interfaces (API) and interoperability protocols

This programme is being carried out by the following Working Groups:

• IPv6 (new Internet protocols to manage differentiated services on the Internet)
• Quality of Service (also referred to as QOS)
• Measurement (of network traffic and patterns of use)
• Network Management
• Routing
• Topology
• Security
• Multicast (for delivery of new types of media including sound and video)
• Network Storage

Some working groups have made more progress than others. Some are still formulating frameworks but several have substantial programmes of their own planned or in operation.

The other Working Group is concerned with the development of an applications development toolkit (see ‘Internet2: Applications' below)

Working Group Projects

Qbone

The Internet2 QoS working group is responsible for the Qbone network. This is an inter-domain test-bed for differentiated services that seeks to provide the higher education community with end-to-end services in support of emerging advanced network applications.

The current position with this development is that the Working Group have published a draft architecture which spells out the minimum requirements for a network to participate in the Qbone and support the differentiated services. They have also held one Workshop and a number of network and planning meetings. This Group is working closely with the IPv6 Working Group which is specifying the protocols that will support the differentiated services.

Distributed Storage Infrastructure (DSI)

The Internet2 Network Storage Working Group is seeking to deploy advanced storage based services. The group intends to focus its efforts on the use of mechanisms such as data caching and replication and will work on

• Encouraging and facilitating the use of web caching
• Work on the definition and use of URN (Universal Resource Names)
• Deploying a testbed of mirror sites

This is similar to the work being carried out in the UK by the National Cache and the National Academic Mirror Service and close links between these groups should be encouraged.

Internet2: Applications

There is a separate Internet2 Working Group for Applications that has been set up to facilitate and coordinate the creation of an applications architecture and applications development tools. The development tools will both inform and take advantage of the advanced network services and will seed the development of a new generation of distributed applications.

The Applications Working Group is keen to test applications in four emerging areas that are of great potential significance to higher education's mission:

• Learningware (for IT-based learning and teaching, especially at a distance)
• Digital Libraries, and the delivery of new types of multimedia content
• Tele-immersion, which offers the potential to create new paradigms for collaboration and communication between dispersed researchers who can share a common virtual environment
• Virtual Laboratories, that provide distributed problem solving and simulation environments across a wide range of disciplines

The applications currently supported include:

• Spatial data visualisation using Internet Geographic Information Systems
• Distributed geoprocessing for spatial analysis
• Access to Television News Archives
• Network Management and visualisation tools
• Distributed Data Mining of Very Large Datasets

Related initiatives

NSF vBNS

The NSF is funding a very high performance Backbone Network Service' (vBNS). This is a development network of its own to permit research and testing of new networking technologies. Access to the network is restricted to permitted applications only. Internet2 GigaPoPs will provide regional connectivity among universities and other partners, and also to the vBNS. The NSF has made more than 70 grants to universities to allow them to connect to the vBNS network.

The GigaPoPs also allow interconnection with a number of other high performance development networks run by other Federal agencies & NASA's Research and Education Network (NREN), the DoD's Defence Research and Education Network (DREN) and the Department of Energy's Energy Science network (ESnet). The involvement of a number of networks will permit testing of new developments across interoperable backbone, regional and local networks provided by multiple, competitive vendors.

The applications for which the network will be used include:

• Creating 3-D simulations and tracking of eco-systems
• Digital simulations of Chesapeake Bay, visible to multiple research teams
• Studies of weather patterns

NGI

The Next Generation Internet (NGI) is a multi-agency Federal research and development program that is developing advanced networking technologies, and applications that require advanced networking. It is seeking to demonstrate these capabilities on test-beds that are 100 to 1000 times faster end-to-end than current Internet performance.

Many of the NSF grants awarded as part of this initiative support research into new hardware and software to make the network capable of sending huge amounts of data at very high speeds and theoretical studies into how this vast traffic will be managed and routed correctly.

Some researchers at Internet2 universities are being funded as part of this project to work on the applications which will run across the networks of the future.

IETF

The IETF is the Internet Engineering Task Force. This group is responsible for developing the protocols in use across the Internet. It works through a process that assimilates consensus comments on widely published draft proposals for several generations, that are then developed into new standards. Many of the new services in the general Middleware area will require the development of existing, or creation of new protocols. Their web pages contain the drafts of several proposals at different stages.

Glossary

ABILENE a project of UCAID to develop a high performance network for testing, developing and demonstrating new network technologies and the applications that can make use of the improved network performance.

CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment): a room-sized advanced visualization tool that combines high-resolution, stereoscopic projection and 3-D computer graphics to create the illusion of complete "immersion" in a virtual environment for one or more users.

DSI Digital Storage Infrastructure project. A project to set up a test-bed of mirrored data across high speed networks to improve access to important information for all users of the network, not just those adjacent to high bandwidth nodes.

DVN (or I2-DVN) a digital video network service to deliver high quality digital video content across the network. The project is also looking at issues of licensing and long term archiving.

GigaPoP regional network aggregation points being formed by Internet2 universities to connect to a variety of high performance, and other types of networks. GigaPoPs provide scalable high-speed connection points.

Multicast to transmit a message to a select group of recipients. A simple example of multicasting is sending an e-mail message to a mailing list. Teleconferencing and video conferencing also use multicasting, but require more advanced tools and networks.

Next Generation Internet (NGI) a federal government initiative focused on developing the revolutionary applications and networking capabilities needed by federal mission agencies such as the National Science Foundation, NASA, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Defense.

Quality of Service (QoS) The ability of an application to receive a pretermined level of end-to-end performance from a network. This may include a particular amount of bandwidth or guarantees of maximum latency or jitter.

UCAID the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Developments is the organisation that is running the Internet2 programme. Membership consists of universities, corporate members and affiliates (normally network service providers).

very high performance Backbone Network Service (vBNS) a network that will connect up around 100 research institutions--and already links five NSF supercomputer centers--at 2.4 gigabits per second by the year 2000. Begun in 1995, the vBNS is an investment of up to $50 million in a 5-year National Science Foundation project with MCI.

Virtual Reality An artificial environment created with computer hardware and software and presented to the user in such away that it appears and feels like a real environment. In addition to feeding sensory input to the user, the devices also monitor the user's actions. Goggles, for example, track how the eyes move and respond accordingly by sending new video input.