ADVANCED NETWORKING INFRASTRUCTURE AND RESEARCH $67,910,000

The FY 2003 Budget Request for the Advanced Networking Infrastructure and Research (ANIR) Subactivity is $67.91 million, a decrease of $1.95 million, or 2.8 percent, below the FY 2002 Current Plan of $69.86 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 2003 Request for Advanced Network Infrastructure (ANI) is $46.62 million, a decrease of $980,000 from the FY 2002 Current Plan of $47.60 million. ANI investments have changed the way that research is conducted in many areas of science and engineering by enabling almost instantaneous communications among researchers and educators worldwide. The very High-Speed Network Service -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. 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 the following efforts on extending high performance network connectivity to additional members of the research and education community. ANI will continue the High Performance Network Connectivity (HPNC) program begun in 2001 that extends connectivity to additional members of the research and education community; will develop middleware used to build high performance network applications under a new program in Middleware (MWIR) begun in 2001; and will continue 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 2003 funding for Advanced Networking Research (ANR) is $21.29 million, a decrease of $970,000 from FY 2002. 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 and increased numbers of users, more complex protocols, greater diversity of service types, and greater flexibility of use in mobile 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; and improved network architectures, protocols, monitoring, and management tools. Multidisciplinary small group projects bridging traditional disciplinary boundaries will continue to receive greater emphasis. Experimental aspects will be emphasized in small projects.