Steven Bakker, DANTE-UK, steven@dante.org.uk
Vincent Berkhart, DANTE-UK, vincent@dante.net
Erik-Jan Bos, SURFnet-Netherlands, bos@surfnet.nl
Ron Broersma, U.S. Navy, ron@nosc.mil
John Dyer, Terena-EC, dyer@terena.nl
Kilnam Chon, KAIST-Korea, chon@cosmos.kaist.ac.kr
Donal Hanna, Netskills-UK, donal.hanna@ncl.ac.uk
Doug Hughes, Canarie-Canada, dihughes@canarie.ca
Harhisa Ishida, Univ. of Tokyo-Japan, ishida@u-tokyo.ac.jp
Peter Kirstein, Univ. College London-UK, kirstein@cs.ucl.ac.uk
Kazunori Konishi, KDD-Japan, konishi@lab.kdd.co.jp
Steven Ladouceur, Bell Canada, sladouceur@on.bell.ca
Thomas Lenggenhager, Switch-Switzerland, lenggenhager@switch.ch
Mark Luker, National Science Foundation-US, mluker@nsf.gov
Tracie Monk, DynCorp/FNC-US, tmonk@snap.org
Peter Taylor, Mailbase, Newcastle Univ.-UK, peter.taylor@ncl.ac.uk
Tan Tin Wee, National Univ. of Singapore, tinwee@irdu.nus.sg
Walter Wiebe, Federal Networking Council-US, wwiebe@nsf.gov

II. ACTION ITEMS

The mbone tutorial (PPT slides) developed for the High Performance Computing Modernization Office HPCMO) will be distributed to the CCIRN list [note that a point for this material is included in the text].

Peter Kirstein will send pointer to MERCI project and its list of Mbone tools.

Peter will also coordinate with representatives of the U.S.'s CAIRN and Collaboration in Internet Security (CIS) project to explore collaborating on secure Mbone.

III. DISCUSSION

a. Europe [this segment is based in part on a summary distributed to the CCIRN 8/96].

The co-ordination of the European Mbone takes place under the auspices of the Mbone Working Group of the RIPE NCC based in Amsterdam, chaired by Magnus Danielson magda@it.kth.se. RIPE (see http://www.ripe.net) is a collaborative organization open to all parties operating wide area IP networks in Europe and is an associated organization of the Trans-European Research and Education Networking Association (TERENA), see http://www.terena.nl.

The Working Group aims to encourage the coordination of the Mbone in Europe and to enhance the flow of information on Mbone related subjects inside the European Research Networking Community. The group has created a series of Web Pages accessible through the Mbone Working Group entry at RIPE NCC (see http://www.ripe.net for entrance).

The group operates two mailing list. The general discussion and world exploder list mbone-eu@sics.se is maintained by Hans Erikson of SICS in Stockholm, Sweden - To join this list, send an request to mbone-eu-request@sics.se. Most of the entries on this list are country-level mailing lists (e.g., mbone-nl, mbone-uk, etc.) providing a very high level of coordination. The second list is the operational list : mbone-eu-op@ripe.ne. [To join it, send an message to majordomo@ripe.net with the body content "subscribe mbone-eu-op".]

Physical meetings of the group take place up to three times a year in conjunction with RIPE meetings. The next RIPE meeting is scheduled for January 20-22 in Amsterdam, NL.

At the national level co-ordination of the Mbone is undertaken by national network operation centres such as SUNET in Sweden, the Network Operation and Service Centre (NOSC) on JANET, in the UK. A full list of contacts can be obtained from ftp://ftp.nic.surfnet.nl/surfnet/net-management/mbone/eu-contacts.txt Delays in getting the JAMES (Sept. 96) and TEN-34 (March 97) initiatives underway have contributed to overloading of European networks. Currently, the Ten-34 has no provisions for Mbone; therefore it will be done through unicast tunnels.

While "informal" use of the European Mbone is carried on a daily basis, some formal projects also make regular use of the Mbone on a regular basis. Examples include the MICE and MERCI projects which have been running for over three years. These projects have been developing and using suites of multicast supporting audio/video conferencing applications, with associated multicasting whiteboarding tools to allow fully interactive meetings to take place. The MICE applications have passed through the expert Computer Scientist stage and are currently being adopted by specialists in other fields (for instance language teaching and the medical profession) to support work in their own disciplines.

The MICE project with the support of some national networks and the European Union have set up some MICE National Support Centres intended to give national support to their suite of software. In practice these centres often become sources of advice for end-users requiring general advice on the Mbone. Information on MICE is available at http://www-mice.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mice/.

The RIPE Mbone Working Group web pages also contain information on the latest versions of MBONE applications and tools and pointers to other sites with Mbone resources. Of particular note in this respect is the pointer to Piete Brookes of University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory which gives an indication of the status of all European Mbone routers. Additional work on Mbone exploitation has been undertaken by the TERENA Task Forces on ATM (TF-ATM) and the TERENA Task Force coordinating activities on the TEN-34 network (TF-TEN). These two groups are working with members of the MICE and MERCI projects on piloting experimental ATM networks which provided good Mbone connectivity for Europe.

b. United States

Walter Wiebe (FNC) explained that most multicast efforts in the United States are led by the private sector and the IETF community. Key points of contact include the new IP Multicast Initiative (see http://www.stardust.com/ipmulticast/press/ink.html) and the IETF's Transport Area working groups, particularly the Multiparty Multimedia Session Control (mmusic) working group (see http://www.ietf.org/html.charters/mmusic-charter.html).

Several Federal agencies are also sponsoring research relating to multicast technologies, including DOE/Lawrence Berkeley Labs (see: http://www-nrg.ee.lbl.gov/); DARPA (see the Collaborative Advanced Interagency Research Network, CAIRN, homepage at http://www.isi.edu/Cairn); and NSF (see the NLANR visualizations at: http://www.nlanr.net/Viz/Mbone and details on mbone tools at http://www.nlanr.net/INFO). NSF's very high speed Backbone Network Service (vBNS) is also now running PIM.

Ron Broersma, U.S. Navy, described Mbone activities underway as part of the Department of Defense's Defense Research and Engineering Network (DREN). Within the continental U.S., all DOD R&E centers (approximately 50) now are able to send/receive Mbone. Transmissions are supported by a DS3 backbone with 12 regional nodes. There is also an OC3 experimental ATM backbone with 12 Mbone servers managed at single site (2 Mb allocations).

DoD's High Performance Computing Modernization Program encourages extensive use of videoconferenceing tools and virtual workgroups, and is aggressively promoting the deployment and use of these tools. All DoD managers associated with this program are required to use Mbone for collaborations. To facilitate this use, DREN has developed a starter kit and educational tools on how to set up and use Mbone. These tools are configured so that it multicast feeds are routed across DREN's ATM backbone. This tutorial is available as a power point presentation at http://www.fnc.gov/mbon_tut.ppt.

DoD's simulation community is also actively using Mbone tools as part of their multi-laboratory environment. Historically, this community relied on the Defense Simulation Internet (DSI). The recent Army Experiment III project conducted battle simulations using both DSI and multicast. The findings showed that multicast was far preferrable for scalability reasons. SG2 technology requires replication over nodes which results in increased congestion. There are also proprietary problems with DSI technologies. As a result of these findings, the upcoming STO '97 will rely mostly multicast.

Ron also discussed emerging direct broadcasting applications using multicast technologies. The Navy, with its more than 300 ships, is particularly interested in the bandwidth savings with might accrue from use of direct broadcast and multicast technologies for sending command and control information out to the ships.

For more information on the Defense Research & Engineering Network's mbone efforts, see: http://tiller.arl.mil/mbone.html.

c. Canada

Canada's Canarie National Test Network (NTN) remains one of the largest PIM-based networks. A description of their Multicast Test Project can be found at: http://www.wnet.ca/multicast/index.html.

d. Asia

Kilnam Chon explained that Japan, Korea, and Australia currently have Mbone. Tin Wee indicated that Singapore did have Mbone, but this ended following the privatization of its R&E network. The new provider, TechNet is no longer willing to provide users with a tunnel due to cost considerations.

According to Chon, the proposed Asian Internet Interconnection Initiatives (AI3) project will provide Mbone to its participants, see http://hayate.aist-nara.ac.jp/research/ai3/.

Chon and the participants also discussed requirements for high performance intercontinental Mbone connections. The Asia Pacific Advanced Networking (APAN) initiative in particular is interested in promoting these connections, see http://www.apan.net for details on this effort. Participants agreed that high performance Mbone among international R&E networks would be desirable, and agreed to explore possibilities within their individual networks.

e. Discussions

In addition to discussion of specific efforts noted above, participants agreed that they should explore the possibility of peering at the Ames Internet eXchange's FIX-West Mrouter. (John Myler, NASA, is the point of contact at AIX). Participants also discussed rate limiting on the FIX-West and other routers (e.g., there is a .5 Mb limit at UCL's Mrouter). If users were better able to designate preferences for certain events, then they will be able to better deal with the rate limiting issues.

Participants were also interested in promoting testing of secure Mbone. Peter Kirstein noted that SDR now has the ability to do authenticated and PKI announcements. There may be opportunities for testing secure Mbone as a part of the U.S.'s CAIRN effort (in which Univ. College London is participating) and the Federal Networking Council's Collaborations in Internet Security (CIS) effort, see http://www.fnc.gov/cis_page.html.

Last updated on 23 January 1997