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INTERNET2 COMPREHENSIVE OVERVIEW

By Yasir Aafaq - Aafaq@brain.net.pk

Introduction

The rapid growth and popularity of the Internet is one of the most interesting and exciting happening in the field of networking and communication. A decade ago, the Internet was limited to the academic and research community. Today, Internet has grown into a communication system that reaches millions of people around the world. It provides a powerful and versatile environment for business, education, and entertainment. Benefits of this environment includes a more enhanced and solid economy, a greater choice of places to live or work, a lot more forms of enjoyment, easy and prompt access to life-long learning, and better opportunity to participate in the community, the nation, and the world.

Keeping in view the success of adapting Internet technology to academic needs, the U.S. Education community and a few corporate partners have launched the next stage of Internet development called Internet2. It is a project of the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID) aiming to develop advanced Internet technology and multimedia applications vital for education and research.

The goal of Internet2 is to enhance the current Internet, not to replace it. At this stage, the services of Internet2 are limited to universities only, but as the commercial sector is a partner in this project, they will benefit from applications and technology developed at these universities. Just as the Internet, initially designed for academic community, resulted in World Wide Web (www), the technology of Internet2 will, hopefully cope with both the educational as well as commercial needs.

Why Internet2?

It is undeniable that the quality of service, as perceived by users of present Internet, has declined over the last few years. Technology designed for a network of thousands is used to serve millions. This has had a serious impact on researchers and scholars, who must rely on the Internet for their work, must transfer large amounts of data and use applications for video conferencing & collaboration. Moreover, an array of advanced network-based applications is emerging, which can brought a major change to teaching, learning, and research activities. These applications can not be developed and tested using the communication services in the current Internet.

These issues have motivated scientists, researchers, and engineers to design new technologies, protocols, and standards for communication. These advances should offer reliable, affordable, and secure information delivery thousands of times faster than today. The Internet2 project is launched to achieve these objectives in a sophisticated and productive manner. It will make possible the transfer of new network services and applications to all levels of education and to the broader Internet community.

Internet2 and Quality-of-Service Dimensions

Transferring the load of academic and research-oriented traffic from the commercial Internet to Internet2 will speed data transmissions for users of both the networks. In addition to providing a much faster network infrastructure, Internet2 applications will take advantage of a new set of networking tools, those that will emerge from the experimental work of Internet2 itself. One of the priority tools is quality-of-service guarantees, which are absent from the current Internet. Presently, all data that flows on the Internet is given the same priority as it is passed along the network from one computer to another. Quality-of-service will set priority levels for information that is sent out. It will enable the network flow without the same bottlenecks experienced with the current Internet.

Quality-of-service guarantees allow applications to request a specific amount of bandwidth or priority. This allows two computers running an application like tele-immersion, tele-medicine, or distance-learning to communicate at the high speeds required for real-time interaction. At the same time, a less network-intensive application like searching the Web would use only the connection speed necessary for its smooth operation. This capability is the core addition that will allow the Internet2 to operate 100 to 1,000 times faster than the Internet.

Internet2 is expected to permit requests for at least five dimensions of quality-of-Service. These include:

Transmission speed: The minimum effective data rate to be provided.

Bounded delay and delay variance: The maximum effective interruption allowed, especially for video and other signals that carry real-time information.

Throughput: The amount of data to be transmitted in a specified time period.

Schedule: The starting and ending times for the requested service. A user might specify the exact time in future and the duration for which he wants connection to the network.

Loss rate: The maximum packet loss rate to be expected within a specified time interval.

Internet2 Technology

The Internet2 design focuses on a new technology to provide advanced communication services. The technology is known as GigaPoP (Giga bit Capacity Point of Presence). Logically, a GigaPoP is a regional network interconnect point providing access to the inter-gigapop network for several Internet2 members. Physically, a GigaPoP is a secure and environmentally conditioned location that houses a collection of communication equipment and support hardware. Physically diverse fiber optic and wireless communications paths will maximize service reliability against the unexpected event of physical damage external to the site. In addition, GigaPoPs are designed to be secure from the threats of those who would seek to disrupt its operations. The role of GigaPoPs in the implementation of Internet2 is illustrated in the following figure.

Source: http://whodunit.uchicago.edu/i2/sfengpres.html

In the above figure, Alpha, Baker, Charlie, Delta, Echo, & Foxtrot represent the Internet2 member LANs and the Gigapops are serving as network interconnect point.

A GigaPoP s key function is to exchange traffic with specified bandwidth and other Quality-of-service attributes. In particular, gigapops may link Internet2 LANs to

Other metropolitan area networks (MAN) in their communities;

Research partners and other organizations;

Other dedicated high-performance wide area networks (WAN);

Other network services, for example backbone network providers for Internet.

Internet2 Applications

Interent2 aims to enable new network-based applications. It will do so by developing common standards and support services for new kinds of applications and ensuring the availability of the advanced communication services required.

(a) Application Requirements:

The new set of applications requires a corresponding set of Communications for Internet2. Future applications may demand additional types of services. In order to accommodate both current requirements as well as new requirements for more improved and complex applications, the design of Internet2 must be flexible to a great extent.

It is important for Internet2 to maintain a common bearer service for communication among network applications. A great feature of Internet is its ability to provide communication among any two nodes in a compatible transport format. This strength of Internet must be preserved in Internet2. The Internet2 bearer service must be backward compatible with the Internet. The common bearer service presently is the Internet Protocol (IP) version 4. In Internet2, layer routing will be managed for both IPv4 and IPv6. The new version is needed to accommodate continued growth of the Internet and to meet new requirements in the areas of security, routing flexibility, and traffic support.

In addition to IPv6, Internet2 must enable applications to specify a network "quality-of-service" along dimensions including transmission speed, bounded delay & delay variance, throughput, schedule, and loss rate.

(b) Application Examples:

Following are a few examples of advanced network-based applications, which will benefit from Internet2.

1. Instructional Management System (IMS)

In the traditional instructional environment, the entire instructional process is designed, managed, and implemented by teachers. In networked, distributed environment, this process would of course be designed by teachers but managed by software, and often would be shared between teachers, students, and other entities such as publishers and information providers. This network-based, instructional management system is called the IMS.

IMS can serve students and teachers in diversified ways. Students will be able to learn at any-time/any-place/any-pace and own the learning process to a degree that is currently not feasible using traditional forms of instruction. It can help students to learn more effectively by means of audio, video, graphics etc. Instructors will be able to access a wide range of instructional material easily. They will be able to track new trends in teaching, share creative thoughts, discuss problems faced by teachers in and outside the classroom, and find out ways to make the educational process more effective. IMS will make it convenient for teachers to publish their research work, articles and teaching experiences in electronic formats instead of the conventional publishing process, which is tiresome and takes a lot of time.

A few technologies of the IMS could be developed in today s Internet environment, but the synchronous communication components and technologies for linking and delivering highly multimedia learning materials will require network services not yet available. Internet2 is an opportunity to work on applications for learning-ware and distributed instruction.

2. Digital Libraries

Internet has proved to be an effective environment for developing digital library systems. Such systems include the wide range of operational institutional library systems offering access to online catalogs, databases, and other useful content, such as journals in electronic formats. The new services envisioned for Internet2 offer new dimensions for Digital Libraries program. Very high bandwidth and bandwidth reservation will allow continuous digital video and audio, which will move the digital library system into a broader framework. Images, audio and video can move into the mainstream currently occupied almost exclusively by textual materials. Similarly, Internet2 can change the information access & retrieval systems, which are primarily textual in the current Internet. Other capabilities of Internet2, such as the ability to provide real-time help or expert consultation via audio or video conferencing can also improve and extend the current information retrieval systems.

3. Tele-Immersion

A Tele-immersion system allows individuals at different locations to share a single virtual environment. For example, participants could interact with each other virtually at a conference table, approximating what is possible in a physical conference room. The individuals could share and manipulate data and jointly participate in the design review and evaluation process.

Tele-immersion applications require advances in Internet infrastructure because of their high bandwidth, low latency, and time-dependent synchronous communications characteristics. Internet2 has the potential to support the development of Tele-immersion applications in the areas of tracking, rendering, human interfaces that enhance the shared presence, and shared work tools for communication & collaboration. The integration of real images into virtual environment is very important in order to enable the simulation of realistic shared presence.

4. Virtual Laboratory

A virtual laboratory is a distributed problem-solving environment that enables a group of researchers located around the globe to work together on a common set of projects. It provides an application environment for computational science and engineering. Just like any other laboratory, the tools and techniques are specific to the nature of research, but the basic requirements are shared. Virtual laboratories have been proposed in many disciplines such as biology, astronomy, pharmacy, and materials science.

Interent2 can provide the required technology to develop virtual laboratories. These laboratories can not be implemented in the current Internet, as they require greater bandwidth and low latency in order to transfer information composed of audio, video, and real-time data streams. Multicast protocols and technology are also critical to the collaborative nature of an experiment in such laboratory where people, resources, and computations are widely distributed.

5. Tele-Medicine

For the health care, Internet2 holds tremendous potential, especially in tele-medicine. For such applications, Internet2 technology will provide highly improved video quality and will allow the transfer of real-time data streams. As an example, consider a person undergoing a brain scan. The images created by the scan are converted into a 3-D form and sent through the high-speed network to different brain surgeons for their analysis and views. For a surgeon going into surgery to remove a brain tumor, this type of application can be a great support.

Internet2 provides the opportunity to develop such time-dependent applications. The high-performance network services provided by Interent2 will also make the learning process in the area of medical science, a highly interesting phenomenon.

Abilene: A supporting network for Internet2
Abilene is also a project of UCAID. It is being organized to support Internet2 and encourage the development of advanced applications. The Abilene project will develop an advanced backbone network to connect regional network aggregation points, called GigaPoPs. Abilene is aimed to run at 9.6 billion bps. It will also serve as a separate network to enable the testing of advanced network capabilities prior to their introduction into the application development network. This project will help to advance the field of communication and to make these advancements available to the broader academic and networking communities.

Conclusion

The Internet was initially designed to serve the education & research community, but soon, it became an integrated set of inter-networking resources and services based on open standards in a commercial environment. The World Wide Web (www), with its origin also in the academic community, projected the Internet to its current revolutionary status. Today s most popular Internet applications were developed keeping in view the current network technology. As the need for advanced network applications increased, the higher education community realized that current network technology is not suitable for developing advanced applications such as IMS, Digital libraries, Tele-immersion, and Virtual laboratories. In the potential of these applications, the education community has launched the Internet2 project.

Web Sites

Internet2 is a consortium being led by 202 universities working in partnership with industry and government to develop and deploy advanced network applications and technologies, accelerating the creation of tomorrow's Internet.

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Page last updated: 5/22/07