RFC 1167

THOUGHTS ON THE NATIONAL RESEARCH AND EDUCATION NETWORK ✨

okay bestie, let's start with the header 🎀

This is Request for Comments 1167 🦋, the RFC number that is literally its whole name, iykyk. It's filed under the Network Working Group, dated July 1990, and written by V. Cerf from CNRI (the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, which comes back up later 💅).

It's informational, so it's giving "here's some info for the Internet community," not a standard. It's not an IAB policy or recommendation either 🌸. It doesn't obsolete or update any other RFCs, since the header doesn't list any.

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Status of this Memo 💜

The memo gives a short outline of a National Research and Education Network (NREN). It's info for the Internet community and doesn't specify any standard. It's not a statement of IAB policy or recommendations.

Distribution of this memo is unlimited 🌈.

Abstract ✨

Okay so this one is about pointing at the big factors that will shape what a National Research and Education Network (NREN) ends up looking like. It's implicitly assumed that the system will grow out of the existing Internet, which honestly feels right 🫶.

Acknowledgements 🎀

The author thanks the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Department of Energy and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration for their support through cooperative agreement NCR-8820945. He also thanks colleagues Ira Richer, Barry Leiner, Hans-Werner Braun and Robert Kahn for their helpful comments 💖.

Now the disclaimer, which is the funniest part 💀: the opinions in this paper are the author's personal opinions. They don't represent positions of the U.S. Government, the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, or the Internet Activities Board. And in fact, the author isn't sure he agrees with everything in the paper either! 🙈

A Word on Terminology 🦋

When this paper says "national research and education network," it means "the U.S. National Research and Education Network." It's implicitly assumed that similar initiatives may pop up in other countries, and that a kind of Global Research and Education Network might grow out of the existing international Internet system 🌍. But the main focus here is the U.S. 🇺🇸

Fundamentals 🧚

Here are the big-picture basics, bestie 👑:

1. The U.S. NREN will evolve from the existing Internet base. That means it'll have to fit into an international environment with a bunch of networks that are sponsored, owned, or operated by non-U.S. organizations around the world 🌏.
2. There will still be special-purpose and mission-oriented networks sponsored by the U.S. Government. They'll need to link with the NREN, if not directly support it 🤝.
3. The basic networking architecture will include local area networks, metropolitan, regional and wide-area networks. Some nets will be organized to support transit traffic, and others will be strictly parasitic 🐛.
4. Looking toward the end of the decade, some networks may be mobile (digital, cellular) 📱. A bunch of technologies may get used, including high speed Fiber Data Distribution Interface (FDDI) nets, Distributed-Queue Dual Bus (DQDB) nets, and Broadband Integrated Services Digital Networks (B-ISDN) using Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) switching fabrics. Conventional Token Ring, Ethernet and other IEEE 802.X technology are also in the mix 🔥. Narrowband ISDN and X.25 packet switching network services are likely to play a role too, along with Switched Multi-megabit Data Service (SMDS) from telecommunications carriers. It's also fair to ask what role FTS-2000 might play, at least in supporting government access to the NREN, and possibly in supporting national agency network facilities 🤔.
5. The protocol architecture will keep a layered structure, though the layering may differ from today's Internet and the planned Open Systems Interconnection structures in some respects 🍰.
6. The system will include servers of many kinds to support its general operation. Examples are network management facilities, name servers of various types, email, database and other information servers, multicast routers, and cryptographic certificate servers 📬. It'll also have collaboration support tools, including video/teleconferencing systems and other "groupware" facilities 🎥. Accounting and access control mechanisms will be required 🔐.
7. The system will support multiple protocols on an end to end basis. At the least, full TCP/IP and OSI protocol stacks will be supported 💜. Dealing with Connectionless and Connection-Oriented Network Services in the OSI area is still an open issue. Transport service bridges and application level gateways are two possibilities 🌉.
8. Provision must be made for experimental research in networking so the system can keep evolving technically 🧪. The NREN can't be a static, rigid system any more than the Internet has been since it started. Interconnection of experimental facilities with the operational NREN must be supported 🚀.
9. The architecture must accommodate commercial services, private networks, and Government-sponsored networks in the NREN system 🏢.

Apart from everything above, it's also helpful to think about the constituencies and stakeholders who play a role in using, providing, and evolving NREN services 🫶. Their interests will affect the architecture of the NREN and how it gets created and evolves over time 💅.

NREN CONSTITUENTS 💖

The Users 👯

Okay so, extrapolating from the Internet we have right now, the users of this system are gonna be super diverse 🌈. By legislative intent, it'll include colleges and universities, government research orgs (like the research labs of the Departments of Defense, Energy, Health and Human Services, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration), nonprofit and for-profit R&D orgs, federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs), R&D activities of private enterprise, library facilities of all kinds, and primary and secondary schools 📚. The system is not intended to be discipline-specific, bestie. Every field gets a seat 🪑✨.

It's critical to recognize that even in the present Internet, it's been possible to fit a remarkable amalgam of private enterprise, academic institutions, and government and military facilities. Honestly iconic 👑. The very ability to take such a diverse crowd depends on how free the so-called intermediate-level networks are to accept an unrestricted set of users. The growth in the size and diversity of Internet users, if you can even say it was constrained at all, has been limited partly by usage constraints placed on the federally-sponsored national agency networks (e.g., NSFNET, NASA Science Internet, Energy Sciences Net, High Energy Physics Net, the recently deceased ARPANET, Defense Research Internet, etc.) 💀. Given the purposes of these networks and the fiduciary responsibilities of the agencies that created them, those usage constraints seem highly appropriate 🧐. It may be beneficial to look for less constraining architectural paradigms, maybe through backbone facilities that aren't federally-sponsored 🦋.

The Internet doesn't quite serve the public in the same sense that the telephone network(s) do (i.e., the Internet is not a common carrier) 📞, although the linkages between the Internet and public electronic mail systems, private bulletin board systems such as FIDONET, and commercial network services such as UUNET, ALTERNET and PSI, for example, make the system extremely accessible to a super wide variety of users 🙌.

It'll be important to keep in mind that over time, more and more institutional users will support local area networks and will want to get into NREN that way 🏫. Individual use will keep relying on dial-up access and, as it's deployed, narrow-band ISDN ☎️. Eventually, metropolitan area networks and broadband ISDN facilities may be used to support access to NREN 🌆. Cellular radio or other mobile communication technologies may also get more and more popular as access tools 📱💜.

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The Service Providers 🛠️

In its earliest stages, the Internet was only government-sponsored networks like the Defense Department's ARPANET, Packet Radio Networks and Packet Satellite Networks 🛰️. Then Xerox PARC's Ethernet showed up, and things started to change, and privately owned and operated networks became an integral part of the Internet architecture 🔄.

For a while, there was a mix of government-sponsored backbone facilities and private local area networks. With the introduction of the National Science Foundation NSFNET, though, the architecture changed again to include intermediate-level networks made of collections of commercially-produced routers and trunk or access lines that connected local area network facilities to the government-sponsored backbones 🧩. The government-sponsored supercomputer centers (like the National Aerospace Simulator at NASA/AMES, the Magnetic Fusion Energy Computing Center at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, and the half-dozen or so NSF-sponsored supercomputer centers) fostered the growth of communications networks specifically to support supercomputer access, although over time these have tended to look more and more like general-purpose intermediate-level networks 🖥️.

Many, but not all, of the intermediate-level networks applied for and received seed funding from the National Science Foundation. It was and continues to be NSF's position, however, that such direct subsidies should diminish over time and that the intermediate networks should become self-sustaining 💪. To accomplish this, the intermediate-level networks have been turning to an increasingly diverse user constituency (see section above) 🌍.

The basic model of government backbones, consortium intermediate level nets and private local area networks has served reasonably well during the 1980's, but it would appear that newer telecommunications technologies may suggest another potential paradigm 🔮. As NSFNET moves toward higher speed backbone operation in the 45 Mb/s range, the importance of carrier participation has increased 📈. The provision of backbone capacity at attractive rates by the inter-exchange carrier (in this case, MCI Communications Corporation) has been crucial to the feasibility of deploying such a high speed system 💸.

As the third phase of the NREN effort gets underway, it's becoming super clear that the "federally-funded backbone" model may and perhaps even should or must give way to a vision of commercially operated, gigabit speed systems that NREN users have access to 🚀. If there's federal subsidy in the new paradigm, it might come through direct provision of support for networking at the level of individual research grants, or possibly through a system of institutional vouchers permitting and perhaps even mandating institution-wide network planning and provision 🎟️. This differs from the present model, in which the backbone networks are essentially federally owned and operated or enjoy significant, direct federal support to the provider of the service 🏛️.

The importance of such a shift in service provision philosophy cannot be over-emphasized 😤. In the long run, it eliminates unnecessary restrictions on the use and application of the backbone facilities, opening up possibilities for true ubiquity of access and use without the need for federal control, except to the extent that any such services are considered in need of regulation, perhaps 🕊️. The same arguments might be made for the intermediate level systems (metropolitan and regional area access networks) 🏙️. This does NOT mean that private networks ranging from local consortia to inter-continental systems will be ruled out 🙅‍♀️. The economics of private networking may still be favorable for sufficiently heavy usage 💰. It does suggest, however, that achieving scale and ubiquity may largely rely on publicly accessible facilities 🌐💅.

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The Vendors 🏭

Apart from service provision, the technology available to the users and the service providers will come largely from commercial sources 🛒. A possible exception to this may be the switches used in the gigabit testbed effort, but ultimately, even this technology will have to be provided commercially if the system is to achieve the scale necessary to serve as the backbone of the NREN 🦴.

An important consequence of this observation is that the NREN architecture should be fashioned in such a way that it can be constructed from technology compatible with carrier plans and available from commercial telecommunications equipment suppliers 🧃. Examples include the use of SONET (Synchronous Optical Network) optical transmission technology, Switched Multimegabit Data Services offerings (metropolitan area networks), Asynchronous Transmission Mode (ATM) switches, frame relays, high speed, multi-protocol routers, and so on 🔌. It's somewhat unclear what role the public X.25 networks will play, especially where narrow and broadband ISDN services are available, but it's also not obvious that they ought to be written off at this point 🤷‍♀️. Where there is still research and development activity (such as in network management), the network R&D community can contribute through experimental efforts and through participation in standards-making activities (e.g., ANSI, NIST, IAB/IETF, Open NMF) 🧪🎀.

OPERATIONS 🛠️

okay so it's giving that the current Internet and the NREN we're expecting are both going to have to run in a super distributed way 🌐✨ bestie, with so many different service providers and so many constituent networks (different tech, different owners), there's going to have to be a LOT of collaboration and cooperation just for the whole thing to work 🫶. You can see why by looking at the voice network in the U.S., which runs on the local and inter-exchange carrier (IEC) structure 📞. And lowkey iconic: with that local and IEC setup, it's been possible to support private and virtual private networking too 🦋. The NREN needs to be just like that 💅.

A critical element of any commercial service is accounting and billing 💸. It has to be possible to identify users (billable parties, anyway) and to compute usage charges 🧾. Not saying the NREN component networks have to bill based on usage though 🙈. It might turn out to be better to have fixed access charges that get adjusted by access data rate, which is what some of the intermediate-level networks have figured out 📊. Honestly it wouldn't be shocking to see a mix of charging policies, where usage charges make sense for small amounts of use and flat rate charges are preferred for high-volume use 🍓.

It's going to be critical to set up a forum where operational matters can be debated and ways of running the whole system cooperatively can be figured out 🗣️. A few options are on the table: use the Internet Engineering Task Force as a basis, use the existing telecommunication carrier organizations, or maybe a consortium of all the service providers (and private network operators?) 🤔. Even if this gets kicked off through federal action, it could be really helpful long term if it eventually embraces a way wider community 🌈.

We need agreements on the technical foundations for network monitoring and management, for internetwork accounting and exchange payments, and for problem identification, tracking, escalation and resolution 🔧. We also need a framework to support the users of the aggregate NREN 🫂. This suggests cooperative agreements among network information centers and user service and support organizations to begin with 🤝. Eventually the cost of all this will have to get baked into the general cost of service provision 💰. The federal role, even if it acts as a catalyst in the early stages, might end up focusing on the direct support of the users of the system it finds appropriate to support and subsidize (e.g., the research and educational users of the NREN) 🎓.

A voucher system has been proposed for the NREN 🎟️ that would let users choose which NREN service provider(s) to engage. The vouchers could get redeemed by the service providers the same way food stamps get redeemed by supermarkets 🛒. Over time, the cost of the vouchers could shift so that the big initial federal subsidy shrinks until the vouchers stop being useful, and people buy telecommunications services purely on a cost/benefit basis 📉✨.

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IMPORTANCE OF COMMERCIAL INTERESTS 💼

The initial technical architecture should bring in commercial service provision wherever it can, so the system doesn't end up totally reliant on the federal government for its support and operation 🙅. A hybrid system is expected to develop. For example, the gigabit backbone components might be strictly commercial from the start ⚡, even though the lower-speed components of the NREN could range from private, to public, to federally subsidized or owned and operated 🏛️.

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CONCLUSIONS 🎀

The idea of creating a National Research and Education Network has captured the attention and enthusiasm of an extraordinarily broad collection of interested parties 😍. I believe this is partly because of the remarkable range of new services and facilities that could be provided once the network infrastructure is in place 🤩. If the technology of the NREN is commercially viable, you can easily picture an economic engine of considerable proportions coming out of the widespread accessibility of NREN-like facilities to the business sector 🚀💸.

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Security Considerations 🚨

Security issues are not discussed in this memo. 💀 Bestie, I know, it's a lot. This one is serious, so don't skip past it.

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Author's Address 🧚

The author who wrote all of this, in case you want to reach out:

Vinton G. Cerf
Corporation for National Research Initiatives
1895 Preston White Drive, Suite 100
Reston, VA 22091

EMail: vcerf@NRI.Reston.VA.US

Phone: (703) 620-8990

Thank you for reading, bestie! 💜🌸