Internet2 is a cooperative effort of 106 member universities working together with private member companies and non-profit organizations to build a new high speed national network. Through its Mission and Goals, Internet2 will provide the tools for scientific research and higher education in the 21st century. FSU has joined the Internet2 Project as a charter member. This will provide us with an opportunity to help guide and shape the nature and direction of this initiative. The following information provides some background material about the Project and its current status. It also identifies area where members of the FSU community can actively participate.

Project Description

Building on the tremendous success of the last ten years in generalizing and adapting research Internet technology to academic needs, the university community has joined together with government and industry partners to accelerate the next stage of Internet development in academia. The Internet2 project, as it is known, is bringing focus, energy, and resources to the development of a new family of advanced applications to meet emerging academic requirements in research, teaching, and learning. Internet2 addresses major challenges facing the next generation of university networks by:

First and most importantly, creating and sustaining a leading edge network capability for the national research community. For a number of years beginning in 1987, the network services of NSFnet were unequaled anywhere else. But the privatization of that network and the frequent congestion of its commercial replacement have deprived many faculty of the network capability needed to support world class research. This unintended result has had a significant negative impact on the university research community.

Second, directing network development efforts to enable a new generation of applications to fully exploit the capabilities of broadband networks: media integration, interactivity, and real time collaboration to name a few. This work is essential if new priorities within higher education for support of national research objectives, distance education, lifelong learning, and related efforts are to be fulfilled.

Third, integrating the work of Internet2 with ongoing efforts to improve the production Internet services for all members of the academic community. A major goal of the project is to rapidly transfer new network services and applications to all levels of educational use and to the broader Internet community, both nationally and internationally.

The project will be conducted in phases over the next three to five years, with initial participation expected from leading research universities, a number of federal agencies, and many of the leading computer and telecommunications companies. In the initial project phase, end to end broadband network services will be established among the participating universities. On a parallel basis, teams of university faculty, researchers, technical staff and industry experts will begin designing applications. It is expected that within eighteen months, "beta" versions of a number of applications will be in operation among the Internet 2 Project universities.

Working Groups

Much of the work in developing Internet2 applications will be conducted in various working groups. Each working group will be a collection of people with a similar interest working on identifying and addressing requirements and issues along with planning appropriate demonstration and testbed activities. The proposed initial set of application-specific working groups include:

- application modeling;

- collaboration environments (conferencing);

- remote experimentation (virtual labs) and instrument control;

- digital libraries;

- telemedicine;

- immersion environments (virtual worlds);

- distance-independent instruction (distance learning); and

- music/arts (remote collaboration, virtual galleries).

In addition to these specific applications working groups, we've identified four that we think should be created in common between the Internet2 applications and engineering areas (with some applications issues noted in parentheses):

- quality of service (creating network aware and adaptive

applications--identifying appropriate APIs);

- multicast (video, audio, and beyond to include data streams, e.g.,

from remote scientific instruments "published" through multicast

streams);

- IPv6 (enhancing applications to exploit flows, packet

authentication, and other IPv6 enhancements)

- security (which on the applications side I'd make a subset of a

security, directory, and messaging/RPC working group)

Across all of the working groups, we can create common requirements for such things as scaling, file/web services, and user interfaces. Working groups would interact via email, voice teleconference, at Interenet2 general meetings, and specially called sessions as necessary.

Larry Conrad (larry.conrad@fsu.edu or 644-0066) is acting as the overall Internet2 coordinator for FSU. Jeff Bauer (jtbauer@cs.fsu.edu or 644-4290) is serving as a campus applications coordinator for Internet2. Please contact us if have any questions or are interested in actively participating in the Interenet2 Project.