[Reader-list] Bandwidth of 155 Mbps, i2 promises this

[Jaswinder Singh Kohli]

This is a document about the progress of Internet2
A university project promises a minimum Bandwidth of 155 Mbps
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Regards
Jaswinder Singh Kohli
jskohli at fig.org
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The Uni(multi)verse is a figment of its own imagination.
In truth time is but an illusion of 3D frequency grid programs.
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 Internet2: The Once and Future Net By Daniel Tynan July 10, 2001  

On academia's high-powered Internet2, researchers are redefining what computer 
networks can do. 

  
Internet2 shows us where the public Internet will be in the future. (Photo 
courtesy of the National Tele-Immersion Initiative)

  
Companion articles

Work the Problem, People Armed and Virtual Glossary: Internet2 from A to Z 



Related links

Abilene weather map Animated map shows real-time view of traffic over the 
primary Internet2 backbone (aka, Abilene). 

Gemini Observatory Photos of the final frontier from one of the world's largest 
telescopes. 

Internet2 homepage The inside skinny on the network relatively few are 
privileged to enjoy. 

The nanoManipulator It's a small world after all�and this device shows you what 
it looks like. 

National Tele-Immersion Initiative Want your own holodeck? Start here. 

Ohio State Dept. of Surgery Images from the first online surgical procedure, 
including, yes, a real human gall bladder. 



At a high school in North Carolina, students use an atomic force microscope to 
push cold viruses around as if they were chess pieces. Astronomers at the 
University of Florida in Gainesville gather infrared images of astral dust that 
may some day form into a planet. In Columbus, OH, a doctor peers inside a 
patient's abdomen on a monitor and discusses the procedure with surgeons in the 
OR. 

What's remarkable about these events is not so much what the researchers did as 
where they did it: on their computers, in classrooms and offices miles from the 
actual event. And they did it using a new generation of the Internet that few 
outside academia have been privileged to enjoy.

A Time Machine 

Today, 185 universities and research labs are breezing along on a parallel 
network to the public Internet called Internet2. Launched in 1996, Internet2 
offers super-fast connections to two fiber-optic backbones and networking 
protocols that ensure data arrives at its destination without loss or delay. 

Internet2 is more than just a bandwidth banquet; it's the petri dish where 
tomorrow's Internet applications are being grown�from new ways to conduct 
surgery to virtual worlds where you can interact with colleagues across the 
continent. 

Universities are using Internet2 to open their doors to remotely located 
students via distance-learning applications. Computer scientists are using it to 
collaborate on complex computational projects such as long-term weather 
forecasting. Researchers at the University of Washington are streaming high-
definition video over the network in what could be a preview of tomorrow's TV. 

Last February, NYU and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute released the first 
opera distributed over Internet2. Entitled "The Technophobe and the Madman," the 
play was performed simultaneously on two stages 160 miles apart. 

Ted Hanss, director of application development for Internet2 in Ann Arbor, MI, 
urges people to "think about Internet2 as a time machine, showing us where the 
[public] Internet will be in three to five years." 

Hanss's timetable may be a tad optimistic. Although Internet2's cutting-edge 
networking technology is already being introduced on the commercial Net, 
upgrading the public infrastructure will take far longer�especially for the 
"last mile" of slow, dial-up connections used by the vast majority of netizens. 

But it's easy to understand Hanss's enthusiasm. Internet2's sheer, awe-inspiring 
speed indulges projects with grand goals: to defeat geography and circumvent the 
barriers of time and space.

History of the Future

Back in the mid-90s, the Internet was going through a midlife crisis. Initially 
built to help universities share research data, the Net was starting to bog down 
under the weight of commercial traffic. Research institutions no longer had the 
bandwidth they needed. 

It was time to build an exclusive new network that could handle bandwidth-
intensive applications from the ground up. With these goals in mind, 34 research 
institutions got together in 1996 to form the Internet2 consortium.

Around the same time, the federal government launched the Next Generation 
Internet initiative, a project with virtually identical goals but focused on 
government agencies such as NASA and the Department of Defense. 

Over time, the two networks have become complementary, sharing similar research 
goals and resources. The biggest difference is that while Next Generation 
Internet is paid for by tax dollars, Internet2 is privately funded.

To join Internet2, you must be an educational institution or private firm 
willing to use the network to collaborate and support the development of new 
applications. Annual costs run between $500,000 and $1 million per university, 
according to Internet2 spokesperson Greg Wood, most of it going toward upgrading 
campus networks. 

In June, the consortium announced it now had member universities in all 50 
states. Over the next few years, it plans to connect thousands of elementary and 
secondary schools, libraries and museums to the Internet2 backbone. 

Meanwhile, private technology companies like IBM and Cisco Systems have poured 
in millions more, typically as equipment grants to member universities. What 
they get in return is expert feedback on the design of new products. 

For example, Cisco Systems has relied extensively on Internet2 research in 
designing its next generation of networking routers�devices that forward data 
packets on the Internet.

"We're not in it for altruism," says Stephen Wolff, manager of business 
development for Cisco in Washington, DC. "It costs us something to participate 
in Internet2, and we hope to regain that and more by translating the technology 
into products people will want to buy." 

The Fast Lane

Internet2's biggest advantage is raw speed. The network uses two high-
performance optical backbones: MCI Worldcom's very-high-performance bandwidth 
network service (vBNS), and Abilene, a 10,000-mile backbone built specifically 
for Internet2 and named after the Kansas railhead that opened the old West to 
settlement. 

Though these backbones are similar to those on the commercial Internet, only 
about three million users can access Internet2, versus several hundred million 
on the public Net. 

Internet2 members also enjoy much faster connections to the backbone, 
eliminating a major cause of Net slowdowns. About one quarter connect directly 
to the backbone; the rest link up through so-called giga-pops�high-speed access 
points located in different regions of the country. 

The minimum connection speed is a blistering 155 megabits per second�a hundred 
times faster than a typical university lab connection and almost 3,000 times 
faster than a dial-up modem.

Across the Universe

But there's more to the network than sheer bandwidth. Network researchers are 
working on ways to implement so-called Quality of Service guarantees, designed 
to prevent data loss and minimize delays as signals bounce from machine to 
machine. 

Thanks to the network's simplified design, data is sent more efficiently and 
with fewer "hops" between routers. Researchers are also looking at ways to give 
some data transmissions higher priority than others. By marking the data as 
"urgent," researchers can make sure real-time video of surgeries cross the 
network before less time-sensitive data such as e-mail.

Another key Internet2 technology is multicasting. This allows a single data 
stream such as a live video broadcast to travel across the Internet and then 
split off copies of itself to multiple destinations. On the public Internet, the 
originating server must transmit a separate data stream to each user, greatly 
increasing congestion.

Researchers are also using the network to test a new version 6 of the Internet 
protocol, the fundamental software that controls the way data is sent over the 
Internet. Among other things, the protocol vastly increases the number of 
potential Internet addresses, preparing for a future where devices from cell 
phones to refrigerators are connected to the Net. 

To Infinity... and Beyond


Using Internet2, the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii alerts astronomers when to log 
on for optimal stargazing. (Photo courtesy of Gemini Observatory)

  
Astronomer Charlie Telesco figures that if he can't go to the mountain, he can 
always bring the mountain to his monitor. The University of Florida professor 
uses Internet2 to solve the eternal dilemma of how to be in two places at once, 
as well as overcome the problem of sharing scarce resources among a pool of 
hungry researchers. 

>From his office in Gainesville, Telesco employs an Internet2 link to peer 
through the eight-meter telescope at the top of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, some 4,500 
miles away. Using a video conferencing application on his PC, Telesco can pan a 
camera around the control room at the Gemini Observatory and converse with his 
counterparts on the Big Island. 

On another screen in his office, a series of control panels surround the image 
transmitted by the telescope's infrared camera. As the data refreshes 100 times 
per second, minute dust particles gradually become visible against a sea of 
background radiation. One day, Telesco says, these particles will coalesce into 
planets. 

"In the old days, the astronomer would come up the mountain, baby-sit the 
instruments, and gather the data," says observatory spokesperson Peter Michaud. 
By the time an astronomer arrived, however, clouds might have moved in, and 
observation conditions might no longer be optimal. 

With Internet2, Gemini can alert the astronomer to log on when conditions are 
right and gather data remotely�increasing both the telescope's efficiency and 
the quality of the data it collects. 

But the arrangement is not without drawbacks. For security reasons, Gemini won't 
let anyone control its $185 million telescopes remotely, so astronomers must 
tell Gemini employees how to adjust the telescope's settings. 

At first, Telesco had trouble getting the infrared images to come through 
Gemini's firewall. Now that it's up and running, Telesco is sold on his high-
speed connection, which he calls "really fabulous."

The University of Florida, which built the infrared cameras used at Gemini's 
observatories in Hawaii and Chile, is working with the Spanish government on a 
10-meter telescope in the Canary Islands. When it comes online, it too will be 
hooked to Internet2. 

"It's likely I might have time on all three telescopes at exactly the same 
time," says Telesco. "One way to handle that is for me to stay at Florida, have 
students at each observatory, and remotely link to all three." 

When he does, Telesco may have a few thousand netizens peering over his 
shoulder. "Eventually we want to do a Webcast from the control room," Michaud 
says. "Let people see how it happens, and dispel some misconceptions about how 
science is done." 

Nano a Nano

While the rule at Mauna Kea is "Look, but don't touch!", elsewhere on Internet2 
you can find gadgets and computers that remote users can control directly. At 
the University of North Carolina's nanoManipulator lab, for example, researchers 
can "touch" objects as tiny as a strand of DNA�even from hundreds of miles away. 

At one end of the lab's nanoManipulator device sits a scanning probe microscope. 
On the other end is a computer running sophisticated 3-D modeling software. 
Using a special joystick known as the Phantom, researchers direct a micro-sized 
probe over the surface of a fibrin fiber, an essential element of blood clots 
that measures barely 50 nanometers high. 

The Phantom's force-feedback mechanism simulates what it feels like to touch, 
squish, even split such fibers in two, capturing data that help scientists 
understand the nature of blood disorders. 

Thanks to Internet2, scientists have used the nanoManipulator to conduct 
experiments as far away as Redmond, WA, more than 2,300 miles from UNC's Chapel 
Hill campus. Researchers at Ohio State have employed the device to manipulate 
fibrin fibers, while students at Orange High School in Hillsborough, NC, have 
kicked around adeno viruses, soccer-ball shaped cold microbes used in gene 
therapy. 

Cyber Collaboration

The real goal of the high-speed connection, however, is to foster collaboration 
with scientists at other universities. 

"Collaboration is the best way to get good work done," says Sean Washburn, 
professor of physics and astronomy at UNC. "As a friend of mine once said, if 
you rub two graduate students together, you get sparks." 

The biggest problem the nanoManipulator encounters is latency�delays that occur 
as data packets bounce from one Internet router to the next. Even a delay of 
1/20th of a second between moving the joystick and feeling the feedback is 
enough to throw most people off, Washburn says. That limits how far away you can 
be before you can't control the device any longer. 

The problem, says UNC professor of computer science Kevin Jeffay, is that the 
Internet isn't designed for "real-time" applications like the nanoManipulator. 
Even Internet2, which offers much lower latency than the commercial Net, can't 
always cut it. To work around these limitations, Jeffay and other scientists 
devise schemes to give certain data packets higher priority than others, so the 
network sends them on faster. 

Even then, he notes, there are fundamental limits to how far such applications 
can work. "If you try to control the microscope from China, the speed of light 
delay to China and back is going to be high enough so that you can't control 
it," says Jeffay. "But going from [North Carolina] to Ohio, the speed of light 
isn't such a problem."

While mere mortals rarely need to manipulate molecules in real time, UNC's 
research has broad implications for anyone who hopes to simulate realistic 
"touch" over a network connection. Low-latency networks will be essential for 
such applications as finding defects in an integrated circuit, examining the 
feel of a suit fabric before purchasing it, or doing battle over an interactive 
gaming network. 

The Abdominal Showman

Examining the far reaches of inner and outer space may make for compelling 
science, but it's unlikely to translate directly to new Internet applications 
that affect our everyday lives. In fields like remote telemedicine, however, a 
fast network connection could be the difference between life and death.

At Ohio State's Center for Minimally Invasive Surgery, a patient is undergoing 
laparoscopy to repair a ventral hernia. Tubes feed a tiny digital camera into 
his abdomen while surgeons watch their work on a TV screen. On the other side of 
town, another surgeon watches a live broadcast from inside the patient's body 
and consults with the doctors. 

Remote hospital procedures such as this one will one day become routine, says 
Dr. Scott Melvin, director of the center in Columbus. Melvin has been both chief 
surgeon and consultant on operations that have been broadcast to San Francisco 
and Washington, DC. 

"This gives you the opportunity to get an instant second opinion," Melvin says. 
"Many surgeons don't have experts available down the hall. [Using Internet2] a 
surgeon in a rural area can call up and say, 'Can you come look at this for 
me?'"

Video conferencing over the commercial Internet is notoriously bad�thanks to 
data loss, latency problems and poor color fidelity. Jerry Johnson, the research 
scientist in charge of the Ohio State project, says it took him and OSU engineer 
Bob Dixon six months to convince surgeons they could get medical-quality video 
over Internet2. 

"But now they love it because it's so spontaneous," says Johnson, who uses off-
the-shelf videoconferencing gear like Polycom's ViewStation, which costs $4,000 
and up. "You don't have to preplan it; all you need is a good 768-kilobit-per-
second connection at each end."

Unfortunately, the remote clinics most in need of medical expertise are unlikely 
to have access to Internet2. Even for non-surgical medical video conferences, 
you'd still need a fast DSL or cable-modem connection, which are not always easy 
to come by.

But as more clinics and individuals gain access to broadband connections, 
telemedicine may become a standard way to monitor patients remotely. "We'll no 
longer just call up patients to ask how they feel," says Melvin. "We'll be able 
to see inside of them and gather objective data in real time."

You Are There... Almost


A tele-immersion session takes place at the University of North Carolina. (Photo 
courtesy of UNC Computer Science department)

  
Most Internet2 applications are really just variations on teleconferencing. 
Ultimately, you're still looking at a two-dimensional video wall. The goal of 
the National Tele-Immersion Initiative is to break through that wall, to create 
the illusion that colleagues across the continent are in the cubicle next door, 
close enough to touch. 

A collaboration between four research centers�Advanced Network and Services in 
Armonk, NY; UNC Chapel Hill; the University of Pennsylvania; and Brown 
University�the NTII might be the most ambitious Internet2 project so far. Even 
the researchers can't talk about it without lapsing into Star Trek metaphors.

"Tele-immersion is kind of a cross between the holodeck and the transporter 
beam," says Jaron Lanier, chief scientist for Advanced Network and Services and 
a pioneer in the field of virtual reality. 

Indeed, today's version shares some qualities of both fictional devices. 

At UNC's tele-immersion lab, a graduate student sits at a desk in front of seven 
digital video cameras. A reporter sits in another room and wears polarized 
sunglasses and a headset, whose movements are tracked by infrared lights 
embedded in the ceiling. A three-dimensional image of the student appears on the 
wall in front of him, against a scanned backdrop of an actual office. 

By craning his neck, the reporter can see objects on the desk behind the 
student�or rather the objects that appear to be behind her. Although she can't 
see him�for purposes of this demonstration, the video is one-way only�when she 
smiles and waves hello, the reporter instinctively waves back.

Work Trek: The Next Generation

>From these humble beginnings, NTII's architects spin scenarios in which people 
interact with each other and virtual objects in 3-D spaces. 

Building inspectors could tour structures without leaving their desks. 
Automobile designers from Detroit and Germany could meet to conceive the next 
generation of sport utility vehicles. Geographically distant surgeons could 
experiment with excising a virtual tumor before working on the actual patient. 
Scientists from across the continent could magnify molecules or shrink down 
galaxies and walk through them. 

So far, researchers have conducted tele-immersion experiments between Chapel 
Hill, Armonk and Philadelphia. The cost in bandwidth is enormous, however; each 
session consumes as much as 25 percent of the backbone. 

And even the most basic tele-immersion experience requires a daunting amount of 
equipment. Besides the cameras and the headgear, it takes two 35-pound Sharp 
projectors to create the telecubicle image and eight high-end PCs to acquire and 
deliver the 3-D graphics. 

Lanier estimates that practical implementations of tele-immersion are at least 
10 years away�an eon in Internet time. Still, the advances in the underlying 
technology have been impressive, says Herman Towles, senior research associate 
in UNC's computer science department. "When we started this project we used a $2 
million SGI Reality [system] to create these images," Towles says. "Now we use 
PCs costing less than $20,000." 

Reality Programming

Though Internet2's potential is compelling, you probably won't wake up one day 
to find your den turned into a holodeck. While some Internet2 technology is 
already employed in isolated locations on the commercial Net, the most 
compelling applications may only be available to those who can afford to pay for 
them. 

One huge stumbling block is the so-called "last mile" connection. When the 
Internet2 faithful talk about broadband, they're speaking of a world where every 
computer is connected at 100 megabits per second or faster. Right now about 95 
percent of U.S. netizens access the Internet using 56K modems; upgrading the 
public infrastructure to achieve 10,000 times that level of performance could 
take decades. 

Initially at least, bandwidth-intensive applications will be limited to big 
organizations that can foot the bill for high-speed connections. For example, 
telemedicine will probably appear first at major regional medical centers, says 
John Patrick, vice president of Internet Technology for IBM in Somers, NY. Then 
as bandwidth gets cheaper, it will spread to local hospitals and eventually 
trickle down to doctors' offices. 

A Question of Quality

Besides raw bandwidth, most Internet2 apps require guaranteed quality of 
service; the data needs to arrive on time and intact. Wolff says Cisco is 
already deploying new routers with QoS features across the Net. But the many 
thousands of existing routers will need to be upgraded with new operating 
systems and internal cards, a costly and time-consuming process. Those most 
likely to endure the expense: major Internet service providers and backbone 
operators who want to offer premium services to corporate customers. 

Implementing QoS means that some data will get better treatment, similar to how 
the U.S. Post Office handles first-, second- and third-class mail. And first-
class Net delivery will cost you. 

"You have to fundamentally charge for these services," says Jeffay. "If you 
don't, then everybody's a high priority."

Similarly, Internet protocol version 6 is being used today in thousands of 
corporate and research networks, which communicate with other IPv6 sites by 
"tunneling over" the current Net protocols. But it will be many years before 
IPv6 replaces the current version 4, if ever, because the IPv4 network is still 
growing at a frantic pace. 

"I see IPv6 taking hold in corporations," says Todd Needham, manager of research 
programs at Microsoft. "It's much easier and cheaper to administer." 

Needham notes that the upcoming Windows XP operating system has quality-of-
service capabilities and support for IPv6 built in. But as with QoS, routers 
need to be upgraded and software written to take advantage of the new 
technology. The companies making the biggest push toward the new protocol will 
be makers of wireless devices, who need the expanded IP addresses version 6 
provides. 

Companies like IBM and Microsoft have already used basic multicasting�sending 
material from a single source to multiple destinations�for internal 
communications. But doing it on a large scale, or managing audio and video sent 
between multiple locations, is a problem researchers are just beginning to 
tackle. 

May the Market Force Be with You

But technological barriers are usually the simplest ones to remove. Moving from 
a collaborative environment like Internet2 to the commercial Internet introduces 
a host of new problems. 

In a high-stakes competitive environment, companies seeking a market advantage 
could attempt to implement their own schemes, which may not be compatible with 
others. In these battles, the best technology does not always win. 

"There are tremendous market forces at play that will impact what the actual 
architecture of the commercial Net is," Jeffay says. "From my perspective, the 
real problems are the socio-economic ones of how do you get these companies to 
play together." 

As in any grand experiment, what goes on in the lab won't always translate to 
the real world. When it's still inside the petri dish, an experiment can be 
controlled. What happens when the beast is unleashed is anyone's guess.