Internet 2

Internet 2

Introduction

Today's packet-switched Internet had its genesis in the American research community at a technological moment when assigning equal status to all packets made sense and worked. That best-effort, one-level-of-service-fits-all model of data transmission, however, has developed some severe shortcomings as information technology has advanced dramatically beyond its capacities in the era of the seminal ARPAnet experiment. Consider, for example, the following two scenarios.

Data from a telescope might be transmitted in real time to a group of astronomers working at different sites around the world. They might collaborate in real time to analyze the data and to decide how to adjust the aim of the telescope to optimize the value of the data being collected during the session. The same data might be multicast to amateur astronomers who have "subscribed" to the appropriate "channel." These amateurs probably would not have the privilege of participating with the collaborating experts who are controlling the telescope, but they might have real-time (or delayed) access to the data generated by the telescope. The archiving of such massive visual and numerical data sets raises interesting indexing and retrieval issues beyond the scope of current research in textual indexing and retrieval.

A student studying the Spanish language might be watching and listening to a digitized video of a conversation between two Spanish-speaking young people that is streaming across the Internet from a distant archive of such conversations. How instructors might locate such materials and negotiate their use by students is one of the issues being addressed by the Instructional Management Systems(IMS) Cooperative, while the indexing of such materials is a concern of both the IMS Project and the more general research community interested in the information science of digital video information.

Both of these visions can almost be realized on today's Internet, but, in the final analysis, both demand a quality of service that cannot be extracted from today's Internet. That quality of service sometimes may depend solely on the high-probability availability of raw bandwidth, but it often depends on the availability of differentiated network services designed, for example, to insure against problems of latency in delivering 30-frames-per-second, synchronized video from distant server to personal computer.

The growing possibilities, such as the two described above, for bridging and expanding the capacities and capabilities of the multimedia computer and the Internet have attracted broad attention in the higher education community. Whether working from the inside or the outside, many with a stake in higher education envision a future when on-line tools for communication and collaboration and on-line learning resources are broadly deployed, not only to strengthen the traditional classroom, library, and laboratory experience, but also to extend higher education's reach with convenient and flexible anytime, anyplace modes of instruction, research, and public service. Today's Internet, however, cannot support the deepest expression of that vision - as illustrated by the two examples requiring differentiated network services and new applications.

The need for differentiated network services and related quality-of-service guarantees loomed large for the leaders from the higher education information technology services and information resources communities who gathered in 1995 at a conference in Monterey, California, with experts from the network industry and the federal and regional network communities. Those differentiated-service needs and their implications for higher education inspired a group of conference attendees to initiate a grass-roots movement that evolved into the Internet2 Project. That grass-roots initiative rapidly migrated into a more broadly representative "movement" supported by Educom, FARNET, the National Science Foundation, other organizations and agencies, and the information technology industry. The resulting series of meetings and workshops motivated over 40 university CIOs to announce the Internet2 Project on behalf of their universities in the fall of 1996. Those institutions committed enough project funding to hire a project director and a staff to operate under the aegis of a small Internet2 Steering Committee. Internet2 membership had grown to include more than 100 institutions by the time a year later when the Steering Committee won the membership's approval for creating the nonprofit University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID) in the fall of 1997.

SOURCE: http://www.internet2.edu

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