By Dr. Philip Baczewski, Associate Director of Academic Computing

We've Arrived at Internet2

Starting on March 30, 2001, the University of North Texas was connected to Internet2 . You didn't notice? Perhaps you've heard about Internet2 and perhaps you even knew that UNT was a member, but unless you are in the field of computing or networking you may not understand the complete technical significance of the University's network connection to Internet2. Right here, in this column, you can learn the technical significance of Internet2. Here it is: the technical significance of Internet2 is that information sent via the Internet from UNT to any of the other 180 or so member sites of Internet2 (and vice versa) might take slightly less time to be transmitted. The result for you is that the Stanford University Website might load a lot faster than say Middle Tennessee State University. Wow!

You might be thinking that there doesn't seem to be much immediate benefit to joining Internet2 and you would be right. Internet2 is not so much about what can be done today, but more about what can be done in the future, and as a member institution, UNT now has a share in shaping that future. Just as the NSFNet fostered the development of the Internet in the 1980's-1990's, Internet2 promises to do the same in the new millennium. NSFNet provided a high-speed stable core network for universities and research institutions in the U.S. The availability of the network meant that bandwidth was available to support a new class of application which transmitted more than just encoded characters, but was able to deal in multimedia materials such as images, sounds, and even movies. The World Wide Web is the surviving technology of that era and has supported the development of the commercial Internet that, until recently, was so popular with stock market investors.

What is Internet2?

Internet2 is not a data network, but rather a consortium of university, research, government, and corporate partners combining to investigate new uses of networking technology. In particular, the focus is on the efficient use of high-bandwidth networks for a next generation of applications. "High bandwidth" just means the ability to transmit larger amounts of information in a smaller amount of time. This is important for transmitting digital information, since the amount of data to represent that information grows geometrically in relation to the complexity of that information.

For example, to send the word "network" in ASCII encoding requires 7 bytes of information. To send a 50 by 100 pixel picture of the word "network" requires about 625 bytes (for the simplest black and white picture). To send that same picture using a combination of 8 colors, would require about 1900 bytes. To send a digital recording of someone saying the word "network" (about 1 second of sound) requires about 44,000 bytes (CD sampling rate, with 8-bit samples). Combine multiple megapixel (i.e. millions of times larger) color pictures (i.e. a movie) and sound, and you can see that the amount of data being transmitted can grow increasingly and dramatically larger, especially if a high quality level (resolution) of picture and sound is required.

The technical non-details

To participate in Internet2, UNT has gained access to Abilene (no relation to the city in Texas), a high-bandwidth backbone network, with multiple gigaPOPs providing access to member institutions. GigaPOP is roughly short for Gigabit network Point Of Presence. A Gigabit network is capable of transmitting one billion bits of information per second. That's roughly 143 million copies of the ASCII representation of the word "network" per second (a bit faster than I can read). UNT's GigaPOP is run by the Alliance for Higher Education and supports a 155 Megabit per second connection to Abilene. We attach to AHE with a 45 Megabit per second connection. The campus network runs at roughly 100 Megabits per second.

To put this in understandable terms, imagine the campus network as a two-lane (in each direction) highway. The road to the GigaPOP is a one-lane highway. From the GigaPOP to Abilene (the network) is a 3-lane highway, and Abilene is (theoretically) a 20 lane highway. If the speed limit of the highway is 60 miles per hour (and everybody obeys), then the maximum speed of a car on the highway is 60 miles per hour, whether it is a 1-lane or a 20-lane highway. So, the shortest amount of time for an individual car going from Texas to California is the distance divided by the maximum speed. A 20-lane highway, however, can carry a lot more cars at the same time. (Networking professionals can stop cringing now and realize that this has been a rough analogy to put this bandwidth stuff in terms that an average person can understand.)

In network terms, information is carried in "packets" (cars). A packet is just a portion of the information to be transmitted over the network. An E-mail message might be split into a number of packets and those packets would be transmitted via the network (highway) and reassembled by the receiving E-mail program. Sending a movie over the Internet requires transmission of many more packets than would a standard E-mail message which consists mainly of ASCII encoded text.

What will we learn from Internet2?

Some of the questions to be answered via high-speed networking research include problems similar to managing a 20-lane highway: with so many cars, how do you ensure that all have the same chance to reach their destination and that some, like fire trucks and ambulances, can have the priority to get through first; with so many packets, how do you ensure that all packets will have the same chance to reach their destination and that some, like that remote controlled surgery application, can have priority to get through first.

The above is just one of the issues being investigated via Internet2. This is generally referred to as Quality of Service (QoS), and seeks to provide the ability to ensure that a minimum level of service can be provided for a particular application. You may notice that if you are downloading a file or viewing an online video clip, the rate of the data transfer may vary, sometimes causing your video clip to "jump" or drop frames. This is caused by varying amounts of data competing for the network. QoS would ensure at least a minimum but constant rate of data transfer for a specific application.

Some of the other areas of investigation include network multicast, which allows for a one-to-many broadcast method of information transfer, rather than the many-to-many method used by current applications such as Realvideo. Another is use of IPv6, which is the next generation of the Internet protocol (the "IP" in TCP/IP) used to transmit information. Additionally, there are groups investigating network measurement, routing, security, and other issues.

The above is all important, but what will really allow the network to make a change in how we educate, do business, or live our lives is new and creative uses of the technology being developed. One example is the performance of an opera in which the performers were in New York City and Troy, New York, and simultaneously performed with video and sound being transmitted via Internet2. What we may see develop from high-bandwidth networks is a new concept of "telepresence". Imagine instead of a small video conference window on your computer screen, you saw the simulated three dimensional image of a person speaking to you from across the country or around the world. The technology is already being developed.

It's up to you...

We've got the network and now we need to figure out how to use it. There is potential for research in almost any field of interest which involves communication. The most potential exists in applications which would connect people at different Internet2 member sites. Imagine what you can do not just with improved communication but a whole new style of communication. If it can be digitized it can be transferred over the network. With enough bandwidth and QoS, simultaneity is guaranteed.

Internet2 is a technology in search of a "killer application." In the early days of wide-area networking, it was E-mail. The obvious second generation "killer app" is the World Wide Web. What's the next killer app? Start inventing now.

If you're a regular Benchmarks Online reader, I sure hope you have some recollection about our membership in Internet2. We have written about it over the past few years, including in this column last month [the final two paragraphs].We announced UNT's decision to join Internet2 in January of 1999 and discussed it again in February in"Campus Computing News" and "The Network Connection." Sometimes Internet2 is referred to as Internet 2 or Internet II, but the official moniker appears to be "Internet2," or "I2" for short, now. -- Ed.