March 20, 2000

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Internet 2 Still Searches For Its Niche
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The goal of Internet 2 isn't just to build high-bandwidth networks, it's to develop well-engineered high-bandwidth networks, says Ted Hanss, director of applications for Internet 2. "Just because it's faster doesn't mean the applications will work better," he says.

Arguably one of the most important Internet 2 initiatives is QBone, which attempts to guarantee low packet loss and jitter by implementing quality of service across campus networks and on the Abilene backbone. The project uses priority tagging in routers to differentiate between traffic that doesn't need priority, such as E-mail, and traffic that does, such as videoconferencing.

The QBone architecture was finalized last summer and is being implemented on the Abilene backbone. Although campuses that connect to Abilene are engaged in a variety of parallel quality-of-service testing work, end-to-end quality of service between campuses across Abilene won't come together until later this year when Cisco delivers functionality for Abilene's edge routers that's based on the DiffServ quality-of-service protocol, says Ben Teitelbaum, chairman of Internet 2's quality-of-service working group and senior engineer of Internet 2.

By then, traffic on Abilene likely will have increased, too, making it a better network for studying quality of service. "When there isn't much traffic running on the network, there isn't much need to do expedited forwarding," Teitelbaum says. But as Abilene continues its buildout and more users start running bandwidth-intensive applications, quality of service will become crucial.

Simultaneous to the QBone initiative, other Internet 2 researchers are working on multicasting, which provides a way to broadcast data to many clients. "Multicasting is a completely different routing environment," Hanss says. "It's almost like laying a new network on top of the Internet."

Multicast was one of the first services available on the Internet 2 backbones because there's an obvious need for it, says Kevin Almeroth, chairman of Internet 2's multicast working group and assistant professor of computer science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a user of Internet 2. For example, the technology can be used to broadcast audio and video or distribute other kinds of content to university students who are connected to campus networks. But the service hasn't been widely used yet because many of the campus networks connected to the Internet 2 backbones aren't equipped to handle multicast, he adds.

Though it's lagging behind quality of service and multicast in the Internet 2 project, IP version 6 is another technology on which researchers have started work. While vBNS already supports IP version 6 routing, the capability isn't available on Abilene. Companies such as Cisco and 3Com Corp. have donated IP version 6 routers to the Internet 2 project, and those routers are ready to be deployed within Abilene, says Guy Almes, Internet 2's chief engineer. Researchers will use those routers in a test environment, he says.

IP version 6's primary advantage over IP version 4, which is used in the commercial Internet today, is its bigger address pool. Specifically, it increases address space from 32 to 128 bits, dramatically increasing the size of the pool and enhancing security. Globally, as more phones become IP-based and the number of other IP devices grows, the IP address crunch is going to get worse, says MCI WorldCom's Wilder.

It may take some time for business users to benefit from Internet 2. While some sources say the commercial Internet could start to see advanced applications resulting from Internet 2 in as little as 18 months, most say it will take three to five years before applications such as teleimmersion become a standard way of doing business. Joel Maloff, president of Internet consulting company Maloff Group International, says that while Internet 2 may deliver some important work on underlying network technologies, it won't necessarily develop applications useful to businesses.

Still, businesses are interested in what's going on with Internet 2. "We have IP version 6 deployment in mind for the ANX because of the added security it offers," says Peter Rosamilia, chief operating officer of the Automotive Network Exchange, a business-to-business extranet owned and operated by Science Applications International Corp. in San Diego.

Ultimately, the real value of Internet 2 lies in the fact that it offers a place to test technologies and applications without tapping into critical production environments such as the ANX or the Internet. Says Michael Turzanski, deputy director of advanced Internet initiatives at Cisco, "If you implement IP 6 and because of some hiccup it brings Abilene down, that's OK. But an ISP certainly can't afford to have that happen in its production network."

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Illustration by Brad Holland
Photo by Dwight Cendrowski

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