High-speed ATM/SONET infrastructure research in ATDNet

Abstract

The Advanced Technology Demonstration Network (ATDNet) was established by DARPA to e n a b l e increased collaboration a m o n g the Department of Defense and other federal agencies. Its primary goal i s to serve a s an experimental testbed for high-speed network research and defense initiatives with emphasis on ATM and SONET technologies. This article presents a n overview of the network infrastructure research that has been performed on ATDNet. Specific areas of focus include network management, signaling, traffic management, supercomputer interconnect, and network testing. The authors present their research activities and results in each of these areas. 18 0890-8044/96/$05.00 0 1996 IEEE IEEE Network JulyiAugust 1996and traffic collection and analysis using our research prototype real-time traffic processor. Supercomputer hierconnectSupercomputing resources are still relatively scarce, and are typically centralized in large supercomputing centers. These resources could be more greatly utilized if users could access them over high-speed channels from remote sites. F u r t h e r m o r e , high-speed network connectivity w o u 1 d fa c i 1 it a t e the current movement toward increased use of distributed applications, a major goal of this task. Network TestingThe first challenge in putting together a leading-edge testbed is to assemble and integrate the various network components. A great deal of technical knowledge a n d hands-on experience were gained by integrating all the ATDNet elements. Research in this area lends insight into issues such as timing and synchronization as well its network engineering and inter o p e r a b ili ty r e qu i re ni e n t s for the highs p e e d ATMiSONET infrastructure. We will discuss our research activities and present our results in each of the above areas in the ensuing v sections. In the next section, we provide an overview of our network management research. In the third section, we describe our research on ATM signaling and present the growth of ATDNet from a signaling perspective. We present our work on ATM congestion and traffic collection in the fourth section, and our research for supercomputer interconnect in the fifth section. The sixth section describes our timing and synchronization experiments as an example of the network testing and characterization work performed over ATDNet. The article is summarized in the final section.