eating dust on the Internet...
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Date: Tue, 14 Apr 98 10:56:01 PST
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Berkeley Lab news release: Internet
Resent-Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1998 11:03:27 -0700 (PDT)
Resent-From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
NEW TECHNOLOGY DEMONSTRATES PRIORITY SERVICE FOR INTERNET TRAFFIC
Contact: Jon Bashor, 510/486-5849, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
BERKELEY, CA. - Scientists at two Department of Energy national
laboratories have successfully marked selected Internet traffic for
priority service over unmarked, lower-priority traffic in a
cross-country demonstration.
This demonstration is a key milestone in the development of a
broad set of capabilities called "Differentiated Services" which are
required for the Internet to be able to give different levels of
service on demand to network customers. The demonstration of such
capabilities for production-mode scientific research between Lawrence
Berkeley and Argonne national laboratories will pave the way for more
reliable and constant connectivity via priority bandwidth on the
Internet.
The demonstration involved sending two video streams over the
Internet from Berkeley to Argonne in Illinois. In a test sharing an
intentionally congested path, the priority-marked stream moved at
eight frames per second, while the standard version transmitted just
one frame per second.
Typically, Internet users encounter a wide variety of
cybertraffic conditions, ranging from free-flowing traffic to
peak-hour jams to complete stalls. With Internet traffic growing by
400 percent annually, such congestion will continue to be a problem.
This situation has left many users wishing for a more reliable level
of Internet service. The current quality of service, called "best
effort," often leaves room for improvement.
Differentiated services will replace "best effort" by
providing specialized services for Internet users who need it and are
willing to pay for it. The idea behind differentiated services is
similar to reserving a first-class, business class or coach seat on a
commercial airline. One means of providing differentiated services is
through a technology called "class-based queuing" developed at
Berkeley Lab.
The new differentiated services technology is expected to
demonstrate to industry how different levels of quality of service can
be implemented and deployed on a practical basis. The technology is
also expected to make it significantly easier to send audio and video
signals across the Internet.
Achieving this improved level of service is essential to the
work of the Department of Energy, which is pioneering the use of
various technologies to allow scientists at more than 30 DOE national
labs to share access to some of the nation's most advanced research
facilities. Having connections that can disrupt real-time research
collaborations in such fields as biomedical research or environmental
restoration can result in both human and financial costs. Reliable
connections allow researchers around the nation to make effective use
of the some of the world's top scientific facilities.
The DOE already has one of the fastest and most reliable
"backbone" networks of the Internet - the Energy Sciences Network, or
ESnet. Scientists at Berkeley and Argonne regularly rely on ESnet to
conduct collaborative research in structural biology, materials
science and physics.
"For more than a decade, DOE computer scientists have helped
develop technologies that have brought the Internet to the level it is
today, and differentiated services is another key step toward
tomorrow's network capabilities," said C. William McCurdy, head of the
Computing Sciences organization at Berkeley Lab. "The fact that
Berkeley Lab operates DOE's primary network and has a world-class
network research group gives us the chance both to make developments
like this one and then to test them in a real network."
Although the idea of differentiated services is simple, coming
up with the enabling technology was more difficult. Because the
Internet is actually made up of millions of interconnected networks,
the technology had to be able to scale up to work across the entire
system. Hardware also had to be developed to differentiate between
different levels of priority for Internet traffic.
The link between Berkeley and Argonne uses new software to
recognize specially marked data packets so that the various networks
and Internet routers will give them priority over packets, which are
not similarly labeled. In limited tests last November, Berkeley Lab
computer scientists successfully proved that the priority-marked
packets were routed through points of congestion, while similar data
in unmarked packets were lost.
The software for marking the priority packets was developed at
Berkeley Lab. Using this software, a policy decision of whom to give
priority to is translated into special router commands to mark the
appropriate packets for priority delivery. This work, as well as
class-based queuing and many of the original key ideas for
differentiated service, stems from research done by Van Jacobson and
his Network Research Group at Berkeley Lab.
Today's demonstration fits together various technologies at
Berkeley and Argonne labs, Cisco Systems and Sprint
Telecommunications. It is a result of a decade of research into
Internet quality of service. Two years ago, the Internet community
began to pursue differentiated services, which resulted in the
approach taken in the labs' demonstration.
The successful demonstration also signifies a new level of
coordination of computer networking research and network operations at
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Two years ago, DOE moved ESnet
operations and administration and the National Energy Research
Scientific Computing Center to Berkeley Lab to foster greater
collaboration between the research and production organizations.
"By giving scientists capabilities that are not yet available
on commercial networks, ESnet is both creating new opportunities for
scientific research and also contributing to the evolution of the
Internet," said Jim Leighton, head of ESnet and the Networking and
Telecommunications Department at Berkeley Lab. "This demonstration is
the precursor to better service for nearly anyone who relies on the
Internet."
Berkeley Lab (http://www.lbl.gov) is a U.S. Department of
Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, Calif. It conducts
unclassified research and is managed by the University of California.
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Bill St Arnaud
Director Network Projects
CANARIE
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.canarie.ca/bstarn
