Internet 2 - WWW: Where, When and Why?

Introduction General During the past decade, federal R&D agencies, the academic community and private companies have worked together to develop many of the Internet's technologies. This partnership has created a multi-billion dollar industry. Internet 2 (I2) is comprised of over 181 US research universities. These universities, working with federal research agencies and leaders of the information technology industry, teamed up to create the next stage of Internet development. The Internet 2 project is a collaboration for the development of a Next Generation Internet (NGI) for research and education that will include enhanced network services focusing on multimedia applications. The work is developmental and pre-competitive in nature (Bakos 1998). It was agreed upon that charter membership in the project remains open for a limited time to additional institutions that are in a position to commit the resources necessary for full participation. Today more than 250 institutions have committed themselves to participate in Internet 2. Objectives The objectives of the Internet 2 project were set as follows: * To maintain a common bearer service to support new and existing applications * To move from best effort packet delivery to a differentiated communications service * To provide the capabilities of tailoring network service characteristics to meet specific applications requirements * To achieve an advanced communications infrastructure for the Research and Education communities The need for a wide range of possibilities for data transmission is obvious and includes mainly current and future applications from the domains of Medicine, Education and Commerce. The list below emphasizes some of the current and future needs that encouraged the professionals to establish and develop the project (Brown 1999). * The idea that transmission rates, error rates, and other characteristics can, to some extent, be guaranteed in advance is known as Quality of Service or QoS. High Quality of Service and an efficient "one-to-many" broadband data transport including support for multimedia and shared information processing will be required for the broad use of distance learning (a.k.a. eLearning). * Leaders of the international research community are in need of high capacity infrastructure and selectable quality of service so that they can make effective use of national laboratories, computational facilities and large data repositories. * Medical researchers require support for remote consultation and diagnoses over highly reliable and predictable communications lines. * Physicists, and especially those who deal with vast astronomical or geophysical datasets, have similar needs. * As commercial transaction data reaches research focus, financial and economic analysts will need real-time access to masses of data. A major impediment to the realization of these applications is the lack of advanced communications services in the current commodity Internet--there is no test case, as yet, by which to prove their effectiveness, much less to implement them on a wide scale. The Novelty A number of technical and practical considerations underlie the overall architecture of the Internet 2 infrastructure. One of these is the need to minimize the overall costs of participating campuses. This is achieved by providing access to both the commodity Internet and advanced services through the same high-capacity local connection circuit. Another catered need is the accommodation of other campus programs and projects. This is done by means of a flexible regional interconnection architecture. For example, a metropolitan area network service might offer high capacity Internet services to students and faculty members. The new, key element in this architecture is the "Gigapop" ("gigabit capacity point of presence") that presents a high capacity, state-of-the-art interconnection point where I2 participants may exchange advanced services traffic with other I2 participants. …