NGI Implementation Plan Section 6: Summary

	6.  Summary
6.  Summary	Summary   The Next Generation Internet initiative will build the foundation for powerful and versatile 21st century networks. The NGI partnership among government, industry, academia, and the general public will bring these diverse talents into focus to solve the problems that have risen from the growing complexity and magnitude of requirements being placed upon the Internet. Without this partnership, solutions will not be forthcoming for at least another decade, and America's technological leadership position will be at risk.   Goal 1 of the NGI initiative is to research, develop, and experiment with advanced network technologies that will provide dependability, diversity in classes of service, security, and real time capability for such applications as wide area distributed computing, teleoperation, and remote control of experimental facilities. These activities focus on network growth engineering, end-to-end QoS, and security.   Accompanying the development of advanced network technologies is Goal 2 of the NGI initiative, development of the next generation network testbed. This effort will overcome today's speed bumps that slow end-to-end usable connectivity; the slowing is caused by incompatibilities in performance capabilities and service models in switches, routers, local area networks, and workstations. Two thrusts within this goal are planned. First, construction of a high performance distributed laboratory consisting of the 100 NGI sites at universities, at Federal research institutions, and at other research partners at speeds in excess of 100 times that of today's Internet. This laboratory will be large enough to provide a full system, proof-of-concept testbed for hardware, software, protocols, security, and network management required by the commercial NGI. Second, development of ultrahigh speed switching and transmission technologies and end-to-end network connectivity at more than 1 gigabit per second. Such networks will be high risk, pioneering networks limited to 10 NGI sites at speeds 1,000 times faster than today's Internet.   These two goals -- experimental research of advanced network technologies and development of the next generation network testbed -- will provide the basis for terabit-per-second networks operated by appropriate network management and control providing guaranteed end-to-end QoS.   Finally, to test the advanced capabilities of the first two goals, Goal 3 will demonstrate a select number of applications requiring these capabilities over the NGI network(s). Procedures have been established to ensure that selected applications provide robust, realistic, complete tests of technologies that can be extended and adapted to other applications. Initial applications are being chosen from the Federally focused applications in appropriate technology classes, such as digital libraries, remote operation of medicine, and crisis management.   Participating agencies coordinate the NGI joint agency effort, and since most of the funds will be provided by the applications, leadership is provided by the domain-specific affinity groups. Agencies conduct their own calls for research and coordinate with other agencies to review the proposals received. An NGI implementation team coordinates research agendas across all goals.   The multi-agency NGI initiative -- a solid partnership with industry, academia and the American public -- thus provides the catalyst for the development of high performance, secure, reliable networks of the future and ensures continued U.S. dominance in the world's high technology networking arena.