[IMR] IMR88-11.TXT NOVEMBER 1988 INTERNET MONTHLY REPORTS ------------------------ The purpose of these reports is to communicate to the Internet Research Group the accomplishments, milestones reached, or problems discovered by the participating organizations. This report is for research use only, and is not for public distribution. Each organization is expected to submit a 1/2 page report on the first business day of the month describing the previous month's activities. These reports should be submitted via network mail to Ann Westine (Westine@ISI.EDU) or Karen Roubicek (Roubicek@NNSC.NSF.NET). BOLT BERANEK AND NEWMAN INC. ---------------------------- REAL-TIME MULTIMEDIA CONFERENCING We have recently commenced a new project in Research into Real-time Multimedia Conferencing. The purpose of this project is to investigate, design and build a prototype infrastructure for developing multimedia communication applications which use the DARPA Internet as the communications network. Our development work will focus on two areas: Multimedia presentation of information and electronic communication of this information between geographically separated sites. This topic falls under the more general area of electronic collaboration technologies. The creation of such a facility will add several important dimensions to the modes of communication able to be supported in a Westine [Page 1]  Internet Monthly Report November 1988 packet switched network. One example of this type application is a distributed Command and Control situation display which would allow geographically separated commanders to cooperate in various decision making activities, using application displays containing multimedia components. Another example is a real-time multimedia conferencing facility which would enable users to confer over computer controlled displays in real-time, together developing cooperative solutions to problems using a variety of advanced workstation-based application programs. To date we have been involved in the following activities: 1 Research into the proper conceptual models for multimedia communication applications. We have been examining all of the systems and models known to support real-time collaboration. In addition, we have examined experienced gained in the DARPA sponsored Multimedia Conferencing System that was developed by BBN and ISI. 2. Design and implementation of an improved multimedia conferencing toolkit which will enable application developers to build new conferencing applications. We expect to release a version of this toolkit to the DARPA community in the first quarter of 1989. 3. Analysis of the issues to be faced by programs that are intended to be used by groups of users: a group user interface. To date most conferencing applications have been single user applications used in a group setting. Our experience with the DARPA Multimedia Conferencing System has shown that this is not enough. We are currently exploring the types of changes to the program operating interface needed in a conferencing setting. 4. Selection or design and implementation of display oriented applications to be developed under this infrastructure. Currently we have designed and partially implemented three new applications, in addition to the Diamond multimedia document editor, which can be used as presenters of source material during a conference: Maptool: A Map Navigation/Route Planning Tool VDP: A Video Disk browser tool Confshell: A multi-user UNIX command shell Presenter: A talk presentation tool We are also evaluating a Command and Control system named VIDS to see if it might be adapted to work in this conferencing Westine [Page 2]  Internet Monthly Report November 1988 environment. We are looking for other applications to bring into this environment either by adaptation or new design. 5. Examination, selection and integration of a variety of new media types to be used in multimedia communication applications including digital video and audio media types. We have designed and are in the process of implementing a Video Information Server which will allow a user at a workstation to access video information from a variety of sources including video disks, tape, cameras and cables. As these developments result in prototypes we will be introducing new capabilities into the DARPA Multimedia Conferencing System. For more information contact Harry Forsdick (forsdick@diamond.bbn.com). WIDEBAND NETWORK The major components of the Wideband Network's monitoring and control software have been ported from the BBN C/70 computer to the Sun Workstation environment, allowing monitoring of the network from Sun Workstations for the first time this month. This development also supports access to real-time Wideband Network monitoring data by distributed Cronus operating system components that use the network for their wide-area communications. The ported network monitoring code was significantly modified to simplify its future adaptation to the receipt and processing of new kinds of monitoring data. Sun-based monitoring and control is planned during Phase 1 of the Defense Research Internet. A new multimedia conferencing site was installed at SRI this month. Including the DARPA, BBN, and ISI sites, there are now four such sites on the Wideband Network. The "ESD-Hypercube" ethernet LAN was connected to the Wideband Butterfly Gateway located at ESD/Mitre facilities. This connection will support distributed Hypercube simulation activities at ESD and JPL. SATNET No changes have been made on the SATNET during the month of November. The installation of the new direct link between BBN and RSRE was delayed because of delays in the installation of the lines by the PTT's. The lines are now scheduled to be turned over for testing, by BBN and RSRE on December 2. Westine [Page 3]  Internet Monthly Report November 1988 INTERNET R&D We fixed a bug which was causing the gateways at RSRE and UCL to restart excessively. New software and patches have been sent to both sites. Also, Bob Hinden attended the DARPA PI meeting in Dallas/Ft. Worth. VAX NETWORKING RFC-1075, describing the multicast routing protocol implemented this summer was issued. Bob Hinden (Hinden@BBN.COM) ISI --- Internet Concepts Project Jon Postel visited Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas to attend the DARPA ISTO PI meeting. Paul Mockapetris attended a WESTNET mtg. in Boulder, CO., 11 Nov. Six RFCs were published this month. RFC 1075: Waitzman, D., C. Partridge, (BBN STC), and S. Deering, (Stanford), "Distance Vector Multicast Routing Protocol" November 1988. RFC 1076: Trewitt, G., and C. Partridge, "HEMS Monitoring and Control Language", Stanford University, November 1988. RFC 1077: Leiner, B., "Critical Issues in High Bandwidth Networking", Editor, Gigabit Working Group, November 1988. RFC 1078: Lottor, M., "TCP Port Service Multiplexer (TCPMUX), SRI-NIC, November 1988. RFC 1081: Rose, M., "Post Office Protocol - Version 3", TWG, November 1988. Westine [Page 4]  Internet Monthly Report November 1988 RFC 1082: Rose, M., "Post Office Protocol - Version 3, Extended Offerings", TWG, November 1988. One article was published: DeSchon, A., and R. T. Braden, "Background File Transfer Program (BFTP)", ConneXions -- The Interoperability Report, Volume 2, No. 12, December, 1988. Ann Westine (Westine.ISI.EDU) Los Nettos All five phase 1 sites are now connected. One redundant path remains unused because CSU/DSU's are not available. Sites are now starting to use Los Nettos to get to other member networks. We have started to EGP with the core advertising accessability to the Los Nettos backbone (which has no hosts) but none of the member networks. We will soon advertise primary access to one or more of our member networks. We have used FTP to exercize the network. Between two unoptimized Sun workstations, one at ISI and one at USC we were able to transfer at a rate of 500Kb/s with bandwidth to spare. Walter Prue visited UCLA 3 November, to discuss adding a line from UCLA to SCSC for Los Nettos. Walter Prue made several trips to UCLA this month to test and debug the Los Nettos connection. Walter Prue hosted the Los Nettos Technical meeting at ISI, 25 November. Danny Cohen has developed a proceedure which periodically pings each interface in the network and can display a map of the network with non-communicative elements highlighted. We have had serious support problems with Datatel our CSU/DSU vendor. There are compatability problems between the Datatels and our cisco routers. Cisco has been very supportive helping us resolve problems. Datatel to date has not. However we have managed to find temporary solutions to our problems. The favorable T1 tariff change proposed by Pacific Bell appears to be delayed. More up-to-date information will be available soon. We can not delay phase 2 waiting for the new tariff. We have received only one purchase order for phase 2 membership in Los Nettos. Because of the two to three month lead time on T1 circuits we will not only need a verbal commitment but a Purchase order soon to get new members operational in time. DARPA has Westine [Page 5]  Internet Monthly Report November 1988 notified us that most ARPANET connections will be taken down by May 1. The ARPANET connection at ISI will remain operational to serve Los Nettos members. Walt Prue (Prue@ISI.EDU) Multimedia Conferencing Project This month the multimedia teleconference facility underwent additional testing for four-site conferences between BBN, DARPA, ISI, and SRI. These investigations focused on the demands of real- time video and audio bandwidth and on the throughput of the Wideband Network. PVP, the packet video host, was modified and tested to enable it to interface with the new ST Gateway. This communication will be over a local net internal to the Butterfly machine. The latest version of MMCC (the MultiMedia Conferencing Control program), with autopilot functionality, was installed this month to facilitate multi-site testing. Redesign of MMCC is underway; use of the Versatile Message Transaction Protocol (VMTP) is under consideration as a replacement for MMCC's home-grown multisite conferencing protocol and collaborative work has begun on the integration of MMCC and BBN's Diamond/MMCONF system. Steve attended the DARPA/ISTO Principal Investigators' Meeting in Dallas/Ft. Worth. Eve and Steve completed a paper about the multimedia conferencing project for inclusion in the upcoming special-issue of the ACM SIGOIS Bulletin on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. Dave Walden, Eve Schooler, Steve Casner (djwalden@ISI.EDU, schooler@ISI.EDU, casner@ISI.EDU) NSFNET Project A major task this month was the preparation of a new release of the NNStat statistics-collection package. Annette DeSchon converted the NIT interface for the stream-oriented version in SunOS 4.0. Working with Van Jacobson, we discovered several bugs in Sun's NIT code. Van Jacobson fixed one bug and suggested a workaround for others; he reported these bugs and the fixes to Sun. Bob Braden made a number of minor updates and efficiency improvements in statspy. We hope to make Release 2.2 of NNStat, including these changes, available early in December. Later, we will create a release with other enhancements, including as access control mechanism. Dave Katz of Merit kindly provided us with the source Westine [Page 6]  Internet Monthly Report November 1988 for statspy changes for access control; he developed this for incorporation into the NSFnet backbone NSS's. Annette also spent time tracking down user problems with BFTP; many of these proved to be bugs in existing FTP servers. These bugs are being reported to the responsible (?) parties as they are discovered. Her work was hampered by very poor Internet connectivity, especially to East Coast sites. She will bring out a maintenance release of BFTP soon. Bob Braden chaired a meeting of the End-to-End Task Force Nov 3-4 at MIT, and worked on updating the Host Requirements RFC in accordance with agreements at the last IETF meeting. Bob Braden and Annette DeSchon (Braden@ISI.EDU, DeSchon@ISI.EDU) MIT-LCS ------- No report received. MITRE Corporation ----------------- No report received. NTA-RE and NDRE --------------- No report received. SRI --- No report received. UCL --- Peter Kirstein attended an EXPRES review meeting, and the meeting for PIs on DARPA projects. We have started work in connection with EXPRES and ESPRIT on the Office Document Architecture, and this is closely coupled with with our existing X.400 Mail system work, and continued use of the Diamond multimedia mail system. John Crowcroft (jon@CS.UCL.AC.UK) Westine [Page 7]  Internet Monthly Report November 1988 UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE ---------------------- 1. Paul Schragger continues to work on priority and type-of- service issues in gateways and hosts. Jeff Simpson continues to work on mechanisms to implement engineered routing policies, as well as a position paper on existing Internet administrative policies. Mike Minnich is working on the first draft of his dissertation. Dave Mills attended the DARPA Principal Investigator Meeting at DFW airport and the IAB teleconference at DARPA HQ. 2. We are trying hard to find the cause of frequent routing spasms that result in our research net 128.4 clocks disappearing from the NSFNET maps for extended periods up to two days. The latest evidence implicates an intermittent routing loop between at least two of the NSFNET backbone NSS switches, which can't happen in correctly functioning link- state routing algorithms. Needless to say, we are working this problem actively. 3. The good folks at Oregon State brought up a Network Time Protocol server in their backyard and quickly discovered very bumpy roads to the NSFNET interstate, including fast, long satellite channels and slow, short 9600-bps country lanes, but very unstable roadmaps. The result is massive, asymmetric excursions in delays and delay dispersions that exceed the tracking range of the phase-lock loop and result in frequent clock resets. The lesson in this and other recent cases is that the phase-lock loop must include an adaptive capability to adjust its tracking parameters and time constants. 4. A paper on multiple-path routing algorithms was incubated, hatched and will be sent shortly to ACM Computer Communication Review for fledging. A first-crash award is being claimed as the first paper submitted to CCR in PostScript format. Another paper on internetwork time synchronization is going through some last-minute reference checking. 5. A white paper on high-speed reservation-TDMA networks is going through final revisions. Our eclectic folks here are now trying to figure out how to schedule multiple trains on a richly connected railroad and are discovering this is really hard. A proposal on engineered routing algorithms is also being incubated. Dave Mills (Mills@UDEL.EDU) Westine [Page 8]  Internet Monthly Report November 1988 NSF NETWORKING -------------- NSF NETWORKING UCAR/BOLT BERANEK AND NEWMAN INC., NNSC Craig Partridge attended the End-to-End Task Force Meeting and Karen Roubicek participated in the FARnet meeting. Karen gave a presentation about NSFNET to the Coordinating Committee of the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites. NSF, NNSC and NCSA are planning a spring networking workshop for representatives from LTER sites, which are part of NSF's Division of Biotic Systems and Resources. by Karen Roubicek (roubicek@nnsc.nsf.net) NSFNET BACKBONE (MERIT) With November over, the NSFNET backbone has been in full production for five months. Both traffic and network connections have continued to increase in this period. The number of "allowed" networks has gone from 173 primary networks and 30 secondary networks at the beginning of July to 334 primary networks, 148 secondary networks, and 6 tertiary networks by the end of November. ----------------------------------------------------------- Packets in Packets out October 356,779,596 443,389,133 November 376,052,359 403,084,221 % change 5.1% -10% ----------------------------------------------------------- Due to an anomaly at MIDNET in October, the packets out of the backbone to the mid-level networks reflect a negative percentage change. On October 15 and 16 MIDNET experienced traffic of 40 million and 25 million packets per day compared to a normal daily average of less than 1 million. Taking into consideration both the MIDNET anomaly and low traffic counts reported throughout the week of the Thanksgiving holiday, the November statistics show a continuation of the rapid growth in backbone use. Packets counts are taken at the token ring interface to the E-PSP in each Nodal Switching Subsystem (NSS) via SGMP. The hourly counts Westine [Page 9]  Internet Monthly Report November 1988 are collected and stored in a database on the Information Services host machine. The D4 framing scheme is presently being used on all 18 trunks of the NSFNET backbone and test network. We will be converting the D4 to Extended SuperFrame (ESF) in the next two weeks. ESF will greatly enhance our ability to directly manage the T1 circuits. It is also a prerequisite to using MCI's Digital Reconfiguration Services (DRS), to allow dynamic reconfiguration of the backbone circuit topology. To improve our ability to monitor traffic flows in the NSFNET backbone we are about to install a modified version of the NNStat packets developed at the Information Sciences Institute. In accordance with our agreement with the National Science Foundation this tool will help us to gather a net to net traffic matrix. The monitor will be located on the internal token rings of the NSS. Modifications necessary to make this work in a NSS environment were software changes to support the package under 4.3BSD as well as PROM changes on the token ring boards of the monitoring RT/PC. by Laura Kelleher (Laura_Kelleher@um.cc.umich.edu) NSFNET BACKBONE SITES & MID-LEVEL NETWORK SITES BARRNET Apple Computer (A/UX development group) and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) were added to the net in November. MBARI has the first known submersible ship-born link to the Internet; an umbilical connected submarine research vessel whose mother ship has a direct microwave link to the land-based MBARINet. Intermittent problems persist in the (1.528Mb/sec) serial links between routers and DSU/CSUs, characterized by periodic increases in receive aborts with occasional paralysis requiring that the CSU be reset or power-cycled or that some other unnatural acts and incantations be performed to recover. Variable receive-abort condition levels accompanied by degraded performance are experienced on other links as well. We are in the process of upgrading the CSUs in the BARRNet "spine" to digital ESF units in the hope that we will eventually be able to monitor the link transmission quality, at least at the level that basic ESF provides (which ain't much). Fun was had by all during the worm-day celebrations, ....repairing Westine [Page 10]  Internet Monthly Report November 1988 the damage done by one inconsiderate jerk.....yes, Martha, we know there are holes in Unix. by Bill Yundt (GD.WHY@forsythe.stanford.edu) CERFNET No report received. CORNELL UNIVERSITY THEORY CENTER The link between CNUSC (Montpellier, France) and Ithaca is working but we are not passing packets yet -- CNUSC is still waiting for parts. We expect to have IP connectivity in late January. The current plan is for this link to connect directly into the NSFNet node in Ithaca, although CNUSC will not take part in the IS-IS routing protocol running on NSFNet, communicating with EGP or its successor instead. Eventually we hope this link will give the North American Internet IP connectivity to a number of major scientific centers in Europe. Even though we are waiting for new GATED funding to arrive, Jeff Honig has been spending some time cleaning up and redesigning existing functions such as the handling of interface up/down events and timeouts, ICMP redirects, and route table hashing, as well as memory management. EGP3 will have top priority once the protocol is clearly defined, and we will be reworking the protocol interfaces and route handling to make it a more useful tool for rapid prototyping and experiments in policy-based routing. Scott Brim has been active in groups handling inter-domain routing issues, such as the Autonomous Networks Task Force and the IETF's Interconnectivity Working Group. by Scott Brim (swb@chumley.tn.cornell.edu) UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN/NCSANET No report received. JOHN VON NEUMANN NATIONAL SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER No report received. Westine [Page 11]  Internet Monthly Report November 1988 MERIT/UMNET During the month of November, Merit changed its ARPANET connection from HDH to X.25. by Laura_Kelleher@um.cc.umich.edu MIDNET No report received. MRNET Internet performance and reachability, as measured by mail throughput, seemed somewhat worse than in the previous few months. There was no clear cause, and few complaints. A few MRNet hosts were infected by the recent worm: the ARPAnet gateway SUN, several at the University of Minnesota, none elsewhere. Most members remained connected for the duration. The organization proved an effective means for exchanging worm-related information and the ensuing security discussion. The Executive Committee met in preparation for the December MRNet General Meeting. This meeting should be an opportunity to describe MRNet to many potential new members. The Final Project Report for the $20,000 NSF grant which seeded MRNet is nearly complete. This document will provide a nice overview of the purpose, origins, and current status of MRNet. by Tim Salo, Secretary, MRNet (tjs@uc.msc.umn.edu) with contributions from Stuart Levy (slevy@uc.msc.umn.edu) NATIONAL CENTER FOR ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH AND UNIVERSITY SATELLITE NETWORK PROJECT No report received. NORTHWESTNET No report received. NYSERNET No report received. Westine [Page 12]  Internet Monthly Report November 1988 OARNET No report received. PITTSBURGH SUPERCOMPUTING CENTER We had no unscheduled network downtime and no significant changes. by Matt Mathis (mathis@fornax.ece.cmu.edu) SAN DIEGO SUPERCOMPUTER CENTER The CERFnet evaluation cisco router has been changed to use IGRP (from RIP) for the internal routing protocol between SDSC and the California State University test nodes. Our direct link (via p4200's) to the University of Hawaii has been disconnected. They now access the Center via the NSI. by Paul Love (loveep@sds.sdsc.edu) SESQUINET No report received. SURANET The following SURAnet sites are presently on-line: University of Alabama at Birmingham Alabama Supercomputer Network University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa Catholic University of America Clemson University Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility University of Delaware Department of Energy/Oak Ridge Operations Office University of Florida Florida Institute of Technology Florida State University Fox Chase Cancer Center Emory University Gallaudet University George Mason University Georgetown University George Washington University Georgia Institute of Technology University of Georgia ICASE (Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering) Westine [Page 13]  Internet Monthly Report November 1988 Johns Hopkins University University of Kentucky Louisiana State University University of Maryland Mississippi State University NASA/Goddard NASA/Langley National Bureau Of Standards National Cancer Institute/Frederick Cancer Research Center National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences National Institutes of Health National Radio Astronomy Observatory National Science Foundation Naval Research Laboratory Oak Ridge National Laboratory Old Dominion University Supercomputer Research Center (IDA) University of Tennessee Triangle Universities Computation Center Duke University North Carolina State University University of North Carolina Tulane University Vanderbilt University Virginia Commonwealth University US Geological Survey University of Virginia Virginia Polytechnic Institute University of West Virginia College of William & Mary SURAnet NETWORKS THAT ARE BEING ADVERTISED TO NSFNET 128.4 DCN 128.8 University of Maryland 128.60 NAVAL RESEARCH LABORATORY 128.61 Georgia Tech 128.82 Old Dominion University 128.109 Triangle Universities 128.140 Emory 128.143 University of Virginia 128.150 National Science Foundation 128.163 University of Kentucky 128.164 George Washington University 128.167 Southeastern University Research Association Network 128.169 University of Tennessee 128.172 Viriginia Commonwealth University 128.173 Virginia Tech Westine [Page 14]  Internet Monthly Report November 1988 128.175 University of Delaware 128.183 Florida Institute of Technology 128.186 Florida State University 128.192 University of Georgia 128.220 John Hopkins University 128.227 University of Florida 128.231 National Institute of Health 128.239 College of William & Mary 129.2 UMD bogon-net 129.6 National Bureau of Standau30 129.43 National Cancer Institute 129.57 Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility 129.59 Vanderbuilt 129.66 University of Alabama 129.71 West Virginia Net 129.174 George Mason University 129.81 Tulane University 130.11 United States Geological Survey 130.14 National Library of Medicine 130.18 Mississippi State University 130.39 Louisiana State University 130.85 UMBC.NET 130.207 Georgia Institute of Technology 131.118 MINC.NET 192.5.39 University of Delaware 192.5.45 Fox Chase Cancer Center 192.5.57 University of Delaware 192.5.82 Florida State University 192.5.214 DEC 192.5.215 George Mason University 192.5.219 Clemson Univeristy 192.12.121 FSUCS 192.12.122 FSUCS2 192.16.175 Georgetown Univeristy 192.16.176 Louisiana State University 192.26.10 Gallaudet Univeristy 192.26.11 National Research Laboratory-HUBNET1 192.26.12 National Research Laboratory-HUBNET2 192.26.13 National Research Laboratory-HUBNET3 192.26.14 National Research Laboratory-HUBNET4 192.26.17 National Research Laboratory-HUBNET7 192.26.26 National Research Laboratory-FIBER Westine [Page 15]  Internet Monthly Report November 1988 192.31.192 IDA/Supercomputer Research Center 192.31.193 Catholic University of America 192.33.115 National Radio Astronomy Observatory 192.41.177 SURAnet Network Operations Center 192.42.63 Educom88-Demo 192.42.64 Educom88mail-demo 192.42.142 ICASE-NET by Jack Hahn (hahn@umdc.umd.edu) WESTNET 1. We are now running ver. 7 of cisco's operating system, which includes cisco's official release of SNMP. SNMP is being tested at the University of Colorado, Boulder (Westnet East), and the University of Utah (Westnet West). 2. The Datatel (now Dowty) CSU/DSU at NCAR on the 56 kbps serial line to New Mexico Technet (NMT) was replaced this month. This link had always been subject to high error rates, resulting in reduced performance and, at times, users even being precipitously logged-off by the host computer. The replacement of the CSU/DSU has apparently fixed the problem. 3. We are running our first X.25 circuit between a cisco gateway at Colorado State University and a CCI gateway at the University of Northern Colorado. Bringing the circuit up was interesting as many of the parameters in the configuration file required "tweaking," but the connection seems to be working well now. 4. Three new networks have been added during the month, all in New Mexico. These include Apache Point Observatory and the National Sunspot Observatory (both connected through New Mexico State University), and the Sante Fe Institute (connected through New Mexico Technet). 5. The annual Technical Group meeting was held Nov. 9-11 at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and was coordinated by Carol Ward who did an outstanding job. The meeting was well attended and informative. Notable among the accomplishments was the working session on the division of NIC/NOC activities. Those interested may obtain a preliminary draft of the "strawman" report from Carol (cward@spot.colorado.edu). by Pat Burns (pburns@super.org) Westine [Page 16]  Internet Monthly Report November 1988 TASK FORCE REPORTS ------------------ APPLICATIONS -- USER INTERFACE The following constitutes a more complete summary of the meeting of the UITF Video Working Group held last May at the MIT Media Lab. (A shorter version was included in the July Internet Monthly). This summary was prepared by Steve Casner of ISI. The focus of the meeting was on "video in workstations" -- what's the state of the art, and how will it be used. Presentations ranged from video window hardware and software to packet transmission of video to video tools and applications. Martin Levy of Parallax, Dave Stewart of Sun, David Milway of Olivetti all described their hardware for video windows on workstations. Video window functions have been added to X-Windows and NeWS, but development is still underway. Glen Reitmeier of the David Sarnoff Research Center described the DVI (Digital Video Interactive) system; though the initial target is CD-ROM-based applications, they view DVI as an architecture that could be applied to workstation video windows as well. Milway's group is also working on packet transmission of video on the Cambridge Fast Ring, and Dan Wilson of Bellcore is transmitting packet video on Ethernet, both at megabit rates with only simple compression methods for now. Steve Casner reported on the multimedia conferencing system using the WBnet, now supporting simultaneous display of video from multiple sites in quadrants of the screen; each video channel is compressed to 128Kb/s. Martin Vetterli of Columbia University described the requirements for video coding for packet transmission, and proposed a "sub-band coding" technique to produce a variable data rate with layers of prioritized data. Harry Forsdick of BBN Labs said he would like to integrate video windows into workstation-to-workstation conferencing. Dick Phillips, appearing on tape, described his "scientific visualization" system at Los Alamos using Parallax and pNeWS to display and capture Cray-generated simulation images on the workstation. Walter Bender and Glorianna Davenport of MIT Media Lab talked about structured video (e.g., documentaries). Ben Davis and Matt Hodges described the role of workstation video for "image learning" in MIT Project Athena. Westine [Page 17]  Internet Monthly Report November 1988 The afternoon discussion concentrated on video applications: How do we use it? It's too early to define the taxonomy of uses for video (and advantages over other media). Participants in the meeting are working individually on a range of video problems, but no group has yet brought all these pieces together to form, for example, a multimedia workstation conferencing system. We need to try these applications to measure how useful they are. For video to be used as other media are now, there is a strong need for authoring tools. People have grown accustomed to high-quality production in video, making the task even more difficult. The need is equally strong for reading tools; structured multimedia documents will have dual control, both by the author defining how the pieces form the whole and by the reader selecting the parts of interest (e.g., text to explain an event in the video or a video segment to illustrate an example in text)". In discussing the above points subsequent to the VWG meeting, the full UITF developed the following list of potential application areas: education, command and control, military applications, process control (monitoring), and medical applications. There was also considerable sentiment that, because of our high expectations (with respect to production quality), we would not see much archival use of the sort of "casual video" that comes from running around with a HandyCam or that resulting from a real-time teleconference. Finally, several members voiced the need to address compression vs. quality as a continuum, rather than assuming some fixed bandwidth and trying to squeeze the quality down, or assuming some fixed quality (e.g. broadcast tv) and trying to squeeze the bandwidth down. Keith Lantz (LANTZ@ORC.OLIVETTI.COM) AUTONOMOUS NETWORKS Several members of the ANTF attended Barry Leiner's second "interconnectivity security" workshop at MIT in November. It was an interesting and productive meeting. In particular, we generated a list of short and long term projects for ANTF and others to pursue in the general area of "policy routing for resource sharing across interconnected autonomous networks". A report on the meeting is being prepared by Leiner. I have prepared a very informal note for the ANTF on the more open- ended issues that arose at the meeting and which deserve further discussion in the task force. Westine [Page 18]  Internet Monthly Report November 1988 We are continuing to refine and elaborate our articulation of these issues and will meet again in February at ISI. Deborah Estrin (Estrin@OBERON.USC.EDU) END-TO-END SERVICES The task force met at MIT Laboratory for Computer Science on Nov 3-4, 1988. The meeting was enlivened by the concurrent de-worming that Dave Clark's graduate students were performing on the MIT networks. IP MULTICASTING Dave Waitzman of BBN completed an initial version of a RIP- based multicast router and submitted an RFC on it (RFC-1075), before funding was exhausted. This code will be distributed by Stanford. BBN is said to be close to completing an SPF- based multicast routing algorithm in the Butterfly gateways. Both the distance-vector and link-state algorithms were described in general terms by Steve Deering in his SIGCOMM '88 paper. Steve's conclusion is that link-state algorithms are more suitable for multicast routing than are distance-vector algorithms. VMTP Dave Cheriton put out a new release of VMTP for Unix (4.3BSD and SunOS 4.0) This release includes major cleanup of VMTP code and many simplifications owing to its use of recursion (as described in Dave's SIGCOMM '88 paper). This version lacks only security and streaming. The task force discussed the procedure for moving VMTP to draft standard status. FAST HOST INTERFACES A number of End-to-End task force members are interested in the the architecture of host interfaces, especially for high- speed networking. Dave Clark has written a paper on this subject, and Eric Cooper of CMU is actually building a high- performance host interface board using very similar ideas. Dave Cheriton is working on his NAB, a high-speed interface board that uses its knowledge of VMTP formats to perform pipelined checksumming and encryption. The task force agreed to make host interfaces an official item of business. Westine [Page 19]  Internet Monthly Report November 1988 PERFORMANCE Dave Clark reported on a paper he wrote with Romkey and Salwen, studying the theoretical performance limit of an actual TCP implementation. Their conclusion agreed with Van Jacobson's, that the ultimate limit on TCP performance will be set by memory bus time to move and checksum the data, not by the protocol processing. There are a number of studies under way on congestion control and rate-based flow control algorithms in the Internet: Van Jacobson, Dave Clark, and Dave Cheriton all have students working in this area. The task force discussed gateway performance issues, distinguishing "soft state" from "caching". Soft state is visible to the higher layers but can be dynamically recreated after a crash. A cache speeds gateway processing while being totally transparent to the architecture. Clark's measurements show that in current IP gateways the IP-specific processing is actually negligible (10%), so caching is not needed; however, it will become vital to achieve high gateway throughputs as more complex gateway algorithms are introduced for accounting, policy-based routing, and TOS routing and queueing. There is some evidence that for stable and fair capacity allocation under rate-based end-to-end flow control, soft state will be needed in the gateways. TIME TO LIVE The task force discussed the ambiguous use of the IP TTL field as both a hop count at the IP level and to bound TCP segment lifetimes. There was a feeling that a transport protocol ought to provide for bounding lifetimes itself; this implies the necessity of universal synchronized clocks. It was suggested that a future transport protocol design should start from the assumption of synchronized clocks, and might be simplified as a result. Bob Braden (Braden@ISI.EDU) Westine [Page 20]  Internet Monthly Report November 1988 INTERNET ARCHITECTURE The INARC Task Force meeting scheduled for 10-11 January 1989 has been cancelled. An Internet research workshop is to be held later in the year sponsored by the ACM SIGCOM and INARC Task Force, which will provide both wide exposure and strong constituency. As previously planned, the workshop will include research presentations, solicited and unsolicited, from throughout the Internet community. Important areas of interest include policy-based technologies, advanced routing architectures, high-speed networks and interfaces, network management, congestion avoidance/control and advanced transport protocols. An announcement is to appear in ACM Computer Communication Review. Dave Mills (Mills@HUEY.UDEL.EDU) INTERNET ENGINEERING The next meeting of the IETF has been scheduled for January 18-20, 1988 at the University of Texas. Additional details and a preliminary agenda will be distributed to the IETF mailing list. Specific requests for information can sent to bowers@sccgate.scc.com. Requests to be added to the IETF- interest mailing can be sent to ietf-request@isi.edu. Phill Gross (gross@sccgate.scc.com) INTERNET MANAGEMENT No report received. PRIVACY During November, John Linn and Steve Kent worked (respectively) on revisions to RFC-1040 and to its companion certificate-based key management RFC. Drafts were distributed to the privacy task force membership before the Thanksgiving holiday and will be reviewed at a one-day task force interim meeting to be held at BBNCC on 6 December. We anticipate broader release of this pair of RFCs early in 1989. John Linn (Linn@CCY.BBN.COM) Westine [Page 21]  Internet Monthly Report November 1988 ROBUSTNESS AND SURVIVABILITY No report received. SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING No report received. DSAB ---- No progress to report this month. Charlotte Tubis (Tubis@Purdue.Edu)