National R&E networking infrastructure

AAMC GIR MEETING

WASHINGTON, DC

Steve Corbató, Director of Backbone Network Infrastructure10 March 2001

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Key points

An overview of the evolving national R&E network infrastructure

Why isn’t high performance networking plug-and-play yet and what can we do abut this?

Going optical – exposing the core of telecommunications

Watch out for genomics!

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Advanced U.S. research university connectivity requirements

• Research testbed• configurable, breakable, measurable infrastructure• serving computer science research and advanced engineering• traditional province of DARPA

• Advanced service/application deployment net• standards based, 7x24 operation expectation (NSFnet vBNS Abilene)

• National education intranet• interconnecting all K-20 educational institutions/networks to

enable applications and services unavailable over the commercial Internet

• Commercial entities (high perf. connectivity)

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Unique features of Internet2 environment

• Per capita available bandwidth O(10-100) higher than over the commercial Internet

• TCP flows of 0.5 Gbps possible

• Active advanced service deployment efforts• Native multicast most widely deployed

• Commitment to open network management and active measurement

• Collaborative relationship with GigaPoPs and research university campus technical communities

• Commitment to the original end-to-end architecture and performance visions

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Abilene – February, 2001

• Inflection point in network development• OC-48c (2.5 Gbps) IP-over-SONET backbone• 53 current and pending connections in 32 states• 175+ participants in 47 states and D.C.• Ongoing strong partnership

–Cisco, Nortel, Qwest, Indiana Univ., ITECs (NC and OH)

• Increasing backbone utilization • Characteristic exponential growth• O(OC-12c) peak utilization on some links• Traffic doubling time: 7 months

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A new perspective on utilization

“Why worry? Abilene only has 10-25% utilization on an OC-48c (2.5 Gbps) backbone”

But we have exponential growth!

“September surprise” in academic nets

Excess capacity is needed to motivate and to enable paradigmatic apps &

services

Last week’s Nisqually earthquake reminded me that outside of the Richter scale, we don’t think exponentially on a daily basis

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“Postel scale”

A means to stop thinking linearly about Internet bandwidth utilization

P = 3 + log10(Utilization/Capacity)

Typical values (range: 3 -infinity)

100% (saturation) P=3

10% P=2 …

0.1% P=0 (floor?)

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Two years later…

A backbone is exceeding 30% utilization

Network manager: “Yikes, our backbone is now running at 2.5 out of a possible 3 on the Postel Scale”

CIO: “Wow, thanks for catching this. Let’s get that upgrade started now.”

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Abilene annual connection fees

Previous New

OC-3c $110,000 ($110,000) SONET & ATM

OC-12c $320,000 $270,000 SONET

$280,000 ATM/1 PVC & 1 BGP peering

$290,000 ATM

OC-48c $495,000 $430,000 SONET

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End-to-End (e2e) PerformanceInitiative

Human to Human Collaboration Experience• User perception EYEBALL• Application CORE APP• Operating system• Host IP stack STACK• Host network card• Local Area Network (LAN) JACK• Campus backbone network• Campus connection to regional network/GigaPoP• GigaPoP connection to Internet2 national backbone• International connections

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New telecom business models

Kudos to NET@EDU Bandwidth Pricing Group

Carriers - two emerging service models

providers

Network host (dim fiber/condominium)

Traders

Bandwidth as the new fungible unit

Should accelerate provisioning - velocity

Basis for a national testbed?

Little altruism (cf. Calif. energy crisis)

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Gigapop Transport Options:Topics for future discussion

•RoW, conduit, dark & dim fiber, ’s

•IRU arrangements

•Optical technologies (amps, repeaters, DWDM, optical switching)

•DWDM interoperability 

•10 Gigabit Ethernet vs. OC-192c

•Strategic carrier hotel development

•Collocation for interconnection, peering (not data centers)

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Next steps for Abilene

Continuing advanced service deployment

Playing our part in E2E Performance Initiative

Ongoing planning for Network of the Future

Close collaboration with the Gigapops and new fiber intiatives

Expanding access to broader education community in support of advanced networking

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For more information

corbato@internet2.edu

www.internet2.edu/abilene

www.internet2.edu/e2eperf