Internet2 Engineering Challenges Campus Engineering Workshop, Houston Guy Almes 10 April 2002

Outline Advanced Services Multicast IPv6 QoS End-to-End Performance Security

Internet2 Engineering Objectives Provide our universities with superlative networking: Performance Functionality Understanding Make superlative networking strategic for university research and education

Advanced Services Multicast IPv6 Quality of Service (QoS)

Multicast By 1998, Native IP multicast quite rare, but MBone no longer scalable Considered key to new conferencing and streaming applications Current native multicast support PIM-Sparse, MBGP, and MSDP Emphases on Deployment and support for operations Applications Working to make it scalable SSM

Current Multicast Emphases Pressing ahead on Deployment What are the current inhibitors to progress? Applications / Content Make it useful for your campuses Explore the role of multicast in the future Internet Improve Scalability Press deployment of SSM Explore the role of SSM

QoS What if best-efforts networking will not meet the needs of advanced applications? Stress of Interoperability Stress of Application needs Preserve core Internet values

IPv6 Clarify motivation for IPv6 End-to-end transparency and global addressability Supports application innovation, e.g., peer-to-peer Support deployment and engineering expertise on networks, especially on campus Anticipate need for first-class support E.g., 10 Gb/s Abilene upgrade E.g., Linux, Windows XP

Current IPv6 Emphases IPv6 Training Workshops About 8-10 workshops this year First: in Los Angeles, hosted by CENIC, in February Get some IPv6 on each campus/gigaPoP Prepare for native peering Abilene to gigaPoP gigaPoP to campus continue within campuses to key departmental LANs Explore applications, DNS, operational stability

The Drive to Native IPv6 Tunneling IPv6 over IPv4 is/was key to early deployment It allows you to deploy anywhere, but with poor performance And the backbone routers were IPv4-only Set of four Cisco 7200s  Tunnel to each other  Tunnel to gigaPoPs and campuses

The Drive to Native IPv6 But, as mentioned, performance is poor Cisco worked hard to support the DV video application, which requires about 32 Mb/s The Abilene Upgrade will support: 10 Gb/s interior circuits between pairs of Router Nodes Dual IPv4-plus-IPv6 routers Native IPv6 between pairs of Router Nodes Native IPv6 only between Router Nodes and gigaPoPs or campuses No support for tunnels to/from the Router Nodes

Demands on GigaPoPs Plan on native IPv6 peering to Abilene routers Tunnels will only be supported to the old 7200s Aim for excellent IPv6 performance and support for unicast and multicast Plan on native IPv6 peering to your campuses

Demands on Campuses Plan on native IPv6 peering with your gigaPoP Plan on IPv6 support for: DNS Network Management , web servers, etc. Support for early adopters

End-to-End Performance

The Current Situation Our universities have access to an infrastructure of considerable capacity examples of multi-hour 1.6 Gb/s flows with no loss and very little reordering End-to-end performance varies widely but 40 Mb/s flows not always predictable users don't know what their expectations should be A well-known mismatch

What are our Aspirations? Candidate Answer #1: Switched 100BaseT + Well-provisioned Internet2 networking at 80 Mb/s But user expectations and experiences vary widely

What are our Aspirations? Candidate Answer #2: Lower user expectations and minimize complaining phone calls There is a certain appeal I suppose...

What are our Aspirations? Candidate Answer #3: Raise expectations, encourage aggressive use, deliver on performance/functionality to key constituencies. Not the easy way, but necessary for success

Threats to End to End Performance Fiber problems dirty fiber dim lighting 'not quite right' connectors

Threats to End to End Performance Fiber problems Switches horsepower full vs half-duplex head-of-line blocking

Threats to End to End Performance Fiber problems Switches Inadvertently stingy provisioning mostly communication happens also in international settings

Threats to End to End Performance Fiber problems Switches Inadvertently stingy provisioning Wrong Routing asymmetric best use of Internet2 distance

Threats to End to End Performance Fiber problems Switches Inadvertently stingy provisioning Wrong Routing Host issues NIC OS / TCP stack CPU

Perverse Result 'Users' think the network is congested or that the Internet2 infrastructure cannot help them 'Planners' think the network is underutilized, no further investment needed, or that users don't need high performance networks

Security

Security: An unusual Internet2 Emphasis Aspects of Security Security of the infrastructure Security of user host computers Security of information and privacy In the post-11-Sep environment Society will be less tolerant of lax standards Not a distinctly 'Internet2' concern but one that all our universities share