Internet2: Pragmatic Views from Higher Education

Steve Corbató

Table of Contents

• Slides from this Presentatation
• Stan Barber's Notes
• February 1997 NANOG Home Page

Stan Barber's Notes

Internet II is a consortium of about 100 universities. The initial deployment will use a GigaPOP architecture. See http://www.internet2.edu for more details.

Guy Almes will serve as the engineering lead.

US Higher Education has historically played a leading role in several stages of Internet development: ARPANET and NSFNET

Now, US Higher Education is a loud customer of the commodity Internet.

Higher Education observes three core problems with the current Internet.

1. Variable performance over the commodity Internet
2. No excess bandwidth for advanced application development. Dennis Fergerson noted at a recent meeting that advances an applications occurred when there was excess bandwidth available on the backbone.
3. There is currently no ubiquitous 1-10 Mbps yet.

Internet II is not a panacea for higher education:

• Intra-higher edu/federal lab connectivity
• advanced application testbed

Internet II does not obviate the need for commodity Internet connectivity. Internet II is not a transit network for higher education.

The Evolving UW Internet Strategy

BGP 4 provides a basic zeroth level CoS/QoS. Commodity Internet connection is via Nwnet. Work is being done to create a K-20 network and the creation of a Seattle-based exchange point (SNNAP). The next generation Internet will initially be done using vBNS and the I2 architecture.

SNNAP overview – UW is operating as a provider-neutral organizer/operator with an emphasis on local connectivity. There will be a minimal rule set for connectees with all peering done via bilateral agreements.

Next Generation Internet Initiatives at UW

Premise: There will be a requirement to develop applications to address distance education and remote collaboration that transcends the current application base.

• Cooperation on statistics and operations
• Testbed for CoS/QoS-dependent applications
• IPv6 deployment platform?

• Process driven by Higher Ed (EDUCOM and FARNET have been involved as well)
• UW has been involved in this planning since 1995
• The effort reached critical mass in October, 1996
• Now working towards building the Seattle GIGApop.

The vBNS

The AUP for vBNS was modified to permit traffic to go between any two vBNS participants and these participants will be expanded to include more higher ed.

UW received a grant in application class of July 31, 1996 and will initially attach at DS3 in this year and OC3c next year. The vBNS will be the first deployment of the Internet II architecture.