We reported on results as well as work in progress for multiple studies in the area of analysis and modeling of both research and operational wide area networking. Characterization of the traffic composition and performance of wide area data networking environments continues to be an important focus of the activities of the Applied Network Research group. As the emphasis of the ANR group includes aspects of the operational infrastructure as well as academic research activities, the complexities of both areas have influenced the work scope that we describe for 1995.
For 1995 we expect to focus our agenda in three areas: information resources, collaboration resources, and computation resources. We have described our efforts in these areas. In particular, in the first area, we have proposed an architecture for the establishment of information based infrastructure as an application of network provisioning. This project may include hierarchical models, and mirroring, prefetching and caching of information at strategic locations (e.g., NAPs, FIXes)
We are also working with virtual collaborative educational projects, reflecting the second category of communication resources. Finally, we presented our project in the third area, computational resources. Specifically we have proposed an national laboratory for applied network research (NLANR) infrastructure for supporting research on NSF's very high speed backbone network service (vBNS). We expect the initial NLANR framework to grow into an important national asset for the NSF and the U.S. research and education community. Underlying all three dimensions of this research agenda is the objective of evolving national networking not only from a networking perspective, but also including the needs of applications and users.