Over the last decade, collaboration has become a byword in scientific circles. In some cases, collaboration is necessary to bring multiple disciplinary experts to bear on a challenging research problem.
In other cases, collaboration is the only way to share and justify the cost of expensive research equipment and facilities. There are examples, especially in the physics world, of several hundred investigators pursuing a single large experiment.
In many respects, such wide-scale and geographically dispersed scientific collaboration has been enabled by networks such as the ARPANET in the 1980s and NSFNET in the 1990s. The early and primitive services of these networks, such as the file transfer protocol (FTP) and the simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP), have whetted the appetites of both researchers and educators for more and better networking. Since the beginning of commercialization of World Wide Web technology in 1994, a very rapidly evolving and synergistic relationship between scientific need and technological possibility is pushing forward the leading edge of advanced networking and its applications at an unprecedented rate. Indeed, the emerging commercial potential of the Internet and the Web has produced an equally unprecedented level of investment in networking technology by the private sector for purely non-academic uses.
Although the recent acceleration of network research and development is welcome, the vastly increased scale and complexity inherent in the evolution of the next-generation Internet pose many challenges. Perhaps chief among these challenges is the need to strike a balance between those advanced network functions that will be local to users and under their control, and those that require central direction and operational control.
Whether by necessity or design, the sharing of research and educational resources involves personal compromises that are often painful. Many academics have vivid memories of campus time-sharing system debacles of decades past and not a few are currently searching for someone to blame for congestion on their privatized Internet connections.
The architects of the Internet have always prided themselves on its distributed intelligence and ability to deliver a high level of control over network functions to individual users. For a number of reasons, Internet2 and related next-generation development efforts are going to involve more sharing and more compromises than is the case today. In particular, the building of new network services that include such features as integrated voice, video and data, and the availability of these features on a real-time basis, will increase the aggregate bandwidth requirement for university networks by several orders of magnitude over the next five years.
Although there are projections of fiber optic bandwidth cost reductions that ultimately will offset much of this volume increase, the path to such reduced costs is going to be tortuous. The federal and state governments have only partially completed the creation of a competitive marketplace for network connectivity, and the resulting market uncertainties are constraining the allocation of capital to investment in production network facilities.
Interoperability is a second area where greater coordination is going to be essential. As new functionality and accompanying complexity are added to the network, the requirement for many more hardware and software components to operate in perfect unison increases dramatically.
Recognition of the difficulties in developing and sharing common solutions to next-generation Internet challenges lies at the heart of the broad support within higher education for the Internet2 project, which recently became part of the newly formed University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID). Members of the project, which now includes nearly all of the more than 100 American research universities, believe this community effort will have a major payoff in bringing next-generation networks and applications to their campuses sooner and at lower cost than would be the case if the process were left solely to private market forces. The federal government reciprocates this interest through the campus funding, which is being made available as part of the federal Next-Generation Internet (NGI) initiative.
But it won't be easy.
Inside every shared academic resource can easily be a latent tragedy of the commons. Everyone's resource is no one's responsibility. Cynics among us, arguing that the community is not capable of making the compromises involved with sharing network resources, recommend the substitution of raw market forces. More reasoned voices respond that the capacity for amicable sharing is there and needs to be exercised.
In coming months, the first wave of Internet2 applications will begin to appear at research universities, bringing important new opportunities for advancing teaching and research. Along with the opportunities will come the challenge to use the new generation of network tools responsibly so that everyone in the community may benefit.
Michael M. Roberts is vice president of Educom. roberts@educom.edu