ARMONK, NY — To support the QBone, an interdomain
quality of service (QoS) testbed initiative sponsored by Internet2,
Internet2 announced at the recent Spring 2000 Internet2 Member Meeting
the launch of the Abilene Premium Service (APS) test program.
Participation in this program is open to Abilene connectors interested
in wide-area QBone testing to supplement local QBone deployment and
testing efforts. APS is designed for full interoperability with the
QBone Premium Service (QPS) and will be deployed in phases, beginning
with an initial phase dubbed "Sweetwater".
"We envision that the Abilene Premium Service test program will play
an important role in providing backbone transit for QBone traffic, and
that it will add tremendous value and collaboration opportunities to
the QBone deployment and testing efforts of Abilene connected
institutions," said Ben Teitelbaum, Senior Engineer, Internet2.
The QBone Premium Service, and hence the Abilene Premium Service as
well, aims to provide a low-loss, low-jitter service to advanced
applications. Typically, these are real-time applications that support
either human-to-human collaborations or human-to-machine remote
control, and demand a level of interactivity that imposes stringent
worst-case delay, jitter, and loss requirements on the underlying
network service.
"The Abilene Premium Service test program will be a valuable
contribution to our understanding of how new forms of IP QoS can
enhance the capabilities of advanced interactive video applications,"
said Joel Mambretti, Director of the International Center for Advanced
Internet Research at Northwestern University (iCAIR).
The Abilene Premium Service is built on the Expedited Forwarding (EF)
per-hop behavior defined by the IETF Differentiated Services working
group. The basic packet conditioning and forwarding service is
complemented by a measurement infrastructure which will provide
detailed QoS performance data to support end-to-end debugging and
analysis of QoS-enabled paths. OARnet's Internet2 Technology
Evaluation Center (ITEC) will host the Abilene QoS measurement server,
integrating a diverse set of passive and active performance
observations under a common umbrella and supporting the public
dissemination of these data.
During the initial "Sweetwater" phase of the APS test program,
EF-marked traffic injected by a participating connector will be
policed according to an agreed-upon service profile. APS profiles will
be parameterized by an agreed-upon peak rate and maximum burst size.
During Sweetwater, no preferential forwarding treatment will be given
to APS traffic as it transits Abilene. However, because Abilene is
still fairly lightly loaded, this is not expected to be a significant
problem for those involved in testing QoS-sensitive applications. The
subsequent Midland phase of APS testing will include partial EF
forwarding through the Abilene core and policing and/or monitoring at
all connector interfaces to protect EF capacity. Midland is expected
to begin within one to three months.
Abilene connectors interested in participating in the APS test program
should read the detailed "Abilene Premium Service Test Program" document, and should
submit a request for participation to the Abilene network operations
center (NOC) per the procedures described there. Our intention is to
work to support any Abilene connector who is interested in
participating in the APS test program and who is making a good faith
effort to participate in the Internet2 QBone initiative. Participation
of individual connectors may be delayed by the technical limitations
of certain edge cards, limitations of connector access router
functionality, or other technical or operational constraints on the
part of either Abilene or its connectors.
The Abilene backbone network provides high-performance backbone
connectivity to Internet2 universities and other institutions.
Abilene is a packet-over SONET (POS) network, providing coast-to-coast
OC-48 (2.4 Gbps) IP transit, with connectors attaching to one of ten
POPs with either POS or IP-over-ATM access circuits running at OC-3
(155 Mbps), OC-12 (622 Mbps), or OC-48 (2.4 Gbps) speeds. The Abilene
project is a partnership of Internet2, Qwest, Cisco Systems, and
Nortel Networks, with the Abilene NOC supplied under contract by
Indiana University. The Abilene QoS engineering team includes
engineers from all Abilene partners and from the two Internet2
Technology Evaluation Centers (ITECs), hosted by the North Carolina
Networking Initiative (NCNI) and Ohio State University.
The Internet2 QBone initiative was launched by the Internet2 QoS
Working Group in November 1998 to develop and deploy an interdomain
testbed for new IP network services. QBone participants are exploring
the engineering and science of IP differentiated services in the
context of an interdomain testbed that makes these services
incrementally available to the developers and end-users of advanced
applications. The initial focus and first service specified by the
QBone architecture is a low-loss, low-jitter service based on the
Expedited Forwarding (EF) per-hop behavior, defined by the IETF
Differentiated Services working group. For more information about the
QBone, see: http://www.internet2.edu/qbone/.
Internet2 is developing and deploying advanced network applications
and technologies for research and higher education, accelerating the
creation of tomorrow's Internet. Internet2 recreates the partnership
of academia, industry and government that helped foster today's
Internet in its infancy. For more information about Internet2, see:
http://www.internet2.edu/.
More Headlines
| 
![[Alliance]](http://access.ncsa.uiuc.edu/includes/footer-alliancelogo2.gif)
![[NCSA]](http://access.ncsa.uiuc.edu/includes/footer-ncsalogo.gif){kind=small}