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NSF PR 97-56 - September 17, 1997
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NSF Grant Will Spur Collaboration for Internet Tools,
Information and Protocols
The beauty of the Internet is also a beast. The Internet
is a global network of networks -- mostly private,
and often competing among themselves. While the diffuse
structure of the Internet is one of its strengths,
the competitive environment has made collaboration
on operational and engineering requirements difficult,
and has made research on the metrics of the Internet
virtually impossible.
To help address these concerns, the National Science
Foundation (NSF) recently awarded a seed grant of
more than $3.1 million over three years to the University
of California, San Diego to establish the Cooperative
Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA). The
association is aimed at promoting a more robust, scalable
Internet infrastructure. CAIDA will foster engineering
and technical collaborations among Internet providers,
vendors and user groups.
"CAIDA will provide a neutral forum for competing
interests to work together," said Tracie Monk, CAIDA
director of external affairs.
"As the Internet was evolving, statistics about the
NSFNET, the major backbone, were readily available.
And operational standards were set through a collaborative
'Request for Comments' process. Now that the Internet
has grown into a competitive, commercial environment,
modes of collaboration must also change."
CAIDA is a spinoff of the NSF-supported National Laboratory
for Applied Network Research (NLANR). Based at UCSD,
NLANR involves the five NSF-backed supercomputing
centers and supports the very high performance Backbone
Network Service (vBNS). CAIDA and NLANR will continue
to collaborate. CAIDA's focus will be on the commercial
sector and on transferring to industrial use many
of the new tools and technologies being developed
by NLANR and other research institutions. CAIDA's
initial goals include:
- Collaborating with the Internet Engineering Task
Force (IETF) and others to create a set of Internet
performance metrics (while working with industry,
consumer, regulatory and other representatives
to assure their utility and acceptance);
- Creating a collaborative research environment
in which commercial providers can develop tools
to share performance and engineering data confidentially,
or in desensitized forms; and,
- Fostering the development of advanced networking
technologies, such as: Multicast and the MBONE;
traffic performance and flow characterization
tools; traffic visualizations, simulations and
analyses; "Next Generation" protocols and technologies;
web caching protocols; and protocols for bandwidth
reservation and quality of service guarantees.
"Commercial organizations recognize the critical need
to work cooperatively with public and private industry
in order to advance the state of the Internet," said
Ed Kozel, chief technical officer, Cisco Systems.
Cisco (a leading provider of networking hardware and
software for the Internet) recently pledged $150,000
to support a CAIDA taxonomy of available Internet
measurement tools. Sun Microsystems and other leading
technology vendors are also in the process of donating
systems to be used in the next generation Internet
Protocol (Ipv6), caching and other research endeavors.
"The continued stability and usefulness of the Internet
relies on the development of advanced technologies
to keep pace with the Internet's growth and evolution,"
said David Staudt, NSF program officer. "A non-profit
is an effective, non-threatening way to collaborate
on a global scale."
Editors: For more information about CAIDA, see:
http://www.caida.org
See also BACKGROUNDER:
New Tool Provides Map of the Internet.
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