ADVANCED NETWORKING INFRASTRUCTUREAND RESEARCH
$64,440,000

The FY 2002 Budget Request for the Advanced Networking Infrastructure and Research (ANIR) Subactivity is $64.44 million, a decrease of $1.11 million, or 1.7 percent, from the FY 2001 Current Plan of $65.55 million.

(Millions of Dollars)

Totals may not add due to rounding.

The ANIR Subactivity supports the research and development of high performance networking for the nation's science and engineering community, as well as fundamental research on networking and network interoperability and scaling in distributed information systems. ANIR also supports extensive collaborative development of national and international networks with other agencies and other countries. This is essential to the development of future generations of networks that will enable new applications such as nationwide and worldwide scientific collaboration, distributed high performance computation, and large scale distributed multimedia networked knowledge repositories. Distance education, Digital Libraries, and e-commerce activities are a few of the rapidly expanding applications enabled by the underlying network research and development that this Subactivity supports.

The FY 2002 Request for Advanced Network Infrastructure (ANI) is $43.91 million, a decrease of $800,000 from the FY 2001 Current Plan of $44.71 million. Over the past few years, the vBNS network, together with the high performance connections program, has led to the development of a new level of networking for the nation's research universities. This work has gained additional momentum through important developments in the university-led Internet2 community. A critical mass of connected sites and research activities is now in position to exploit these important resources. ANI program activities, along with ongoing Next Generation Internet (NGI) efforts, will be continued to ensure essential development of testbed and applications environments. A new network, vBNS+, has been announced by MCI WorldCom as a new high performance network directed toward the research and education community. The very high performance ABILENE network operated by the Internet2 consortium and The University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID) is in full operation.

Based on these accomplishments, the ANI program will focus efforts on:

• a program in connectivity (HPNC) begun in 2001 that extends high performance network connectivity to additional members of the research and education community;

• developing middleware used to build high performance network applications under a new program in Middleware (MWIR) begun in 2001; and

• continuing research in new directions in access network technology through its Strategic Technology for the Internet (STI) Program to extend the reach of high performance network environments.

FY 2002 funding for Advanced Networking Research (ANR) is $20.53 million, a decrease of $300,000 from FY 2001. The focus will be to continue the fundamental research necessary to enable the continued expansion of the capabilities of communications networks. Underlying goals of network research are handling greater volumes of information, increased numbers of users, more complex protocols, greater diversity of service types, and greater flexibility of use in mobile, nomadic, and fixed environments.

Areas for increased support are:

• Wireless network access with improved data rates and improved interoperability with fixed networks;

• Very broadband high performance access networks including optical networks;

• Improved network architectures, protocols, monitoring, and management tools;

• Multidisciplinary small group projects bridging traditional disciplinary boundaries; and

• Experimental aspects in small projects.

ANIR past successes include developing the Internet and then fostering its transition out of government funding and management. The Infrastructure program is currently providing national leadership in developing the next generation of the Internet. The High Performance Connections program supported universities to connect to vBNS and then to develop the Internet2, a private consortium, for high performance connections. These connections are exploring advanced applications enabled by high performance networks and serve as a national model for the future of networking - much as the NSF-Net functioned in the 1980's. While these projects serve major research institutions, others also participate. William Brand and William Lewis of Arizona State University have used NSF support for an Internet connection to all seven sites of the Navajo Community College; this project is enabling residents of any of the 111 communities of the Navajo Nation to attend classes through virtual classrooms.

Networking research is at the forefront of advances in this fast-paced technology. David Tse, a young researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, has made fundamental advances in wireless communication. His mathematical analysis of multiple access wireless in an environment with fading shows that capacity is maximized when only the user with the best channel is allowed to transmit. He also has developed an algorithm schedule access that has been adopted by Qualcomm and shown to double the capacity of their High Data Rate system.

Optical networking, which involves shifting networking functions from the electrical to the optical domain, shows great promise in helping accommodate the rapid increases in Internet traffic. The rapid acceleration of optical technology helped to launch several new companies or groups in existing companies that develop equipment for the Optical Internet. This newly emerging field incorporates many ANIR research results in the area of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM). The work of Robert Gallager and Pierre Humblet, of MIT, on the use of wavelength selective cross-connects to support packet switching laid the theoretical foundation for Sycamore Network's WDM-based Internet router.