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56 1 Advanced Network Technology
would not be generally available to commercial
customers until about 2005.3 Much of the re-
search agenda focuses on higher bandwidths and
more specialized applications than are expected
to have near-term commercial significance for the
telecommunications industry. Industry planning
is oriented more towards medium-bandwidth
multimedia applications-applications that re-
quire more bandwidth than can be supported by
current networks, but significantly less than the
gigabit/second rates required by the supercom-
puter community. For example, the telecommuni-cations industry's ATM-based Broadband Inte-
grated Services Digital Network (B-ISDN) stand-
ard envisions 155 Mb/s channels to each customer
in the near term. Furthermore, many of the
interesting issues related to the operation of fast
packet networks can be studied with lower
bandwidth networks, although a few issues may
only become apparent at gigabit/second speeds.4
TESTBED PROGRESS
The major research results of the testbeds are
still to come. Most of the networks are notBox 4-B-BLANCA
The sites on the BLANCA network Figure 4-B-1 -BLANCA
are more widely separated than those of
the other testbeds. The network links
AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, the Lawrence
Berkeley University of
University of Wisconsin and the University Laboratorie Wisconsin
of Illinois, and the University of California- AT&T Bell
Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley Labora- UC Berkeley University of Illinois, Laboratories
tories (figure 4-B-I). Because of the cost of National Center for
gigabit transmission facilities, high-speed SuApplicautions
links will initially be used only for some
parts of the network. The cross-country
segments of the network will use 45 Mb/s
T3 links. While this bandwidth is not
sufficient for distributed Supercomputing SOURCE: Office of Technology Assessment, 1993.
applications, the BLANCA network will still
provide an environment for researching the behavior of new protocols in a large network
BLANCA is an ATM-based network. The experimental ATM switches and other hardware are being supplied
by AT&T Bell Labs, the main industrial partner for BLANCA. BLANCA builds on preexisting research relationships
between Bell Labs and the University of Wisconsin, University of Illinois, and UC-Berkeley. The switches are
designed in such away as to allow researchers at the universities to "take over" the network, to control the switches
with computer programs that implement their experimental protocols. The network research interests are similar
to those of others looking at ATM-based networks, such as congestion control and the behavior of internet
protocols in an ATM-based network, and is being carried out primarily at UC-Berkeley, the University of Illinois,
and the University of Wisconsin.
BLANCA emphasizes distributed supercomputing applications, as do most of the other testbeds. The
applications work is being done at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the University3M.Niel Ransom and Dan R. Spears, "Applications of Public Gigabit Networks, ' IEEE Network, vol.6, No. 2, March 1992, p. 30.
Leonard Kleinrock, "The Latency/Bandwidth Tradeoff in Gigabit Networks, " IEEE Communications, vol. 30, No. 4, April 1992, pp.
36-40.
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United States. Congress. Office of Technology Assessment. Advanced Network Technology, report, June 1993; [Washington D.C.]. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc40038/m1/60/: accessed March 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.