Proposal Number: 30160

Programme: ACTS

 

Project Title:

COnvergence
Internet-ATM-Satellite

(COIAS)

 

 

Section 1 - Administrative and Financial Data

 

 

Date of Preparation: 26 September 1997

 

Proposal Number: 30160

Programme: ACTS

 

Project Title:

COnvergence
Internet-ATM-Satellite

(COIAS)

 

 

Section 2 - Technical/Management Proposal

PART A

 

Date of Preparation: 26 September 1997

 

Proposal Number: 30160

Programme: ACTS

 

Project Title:

COnvergence
Internet-ATM-Satellite

(COIAS)

 

 

Section 2 - Technical/Management Proposal

PART B

 

Date of Preparation: 26 September 1997

 

Table of Contents

 

 

1. PROJECT OBJECTIVES AND BACKGROUND

1.1 Objectives of the project

1.1.1 The Global Internet Infrastructure

1.1.2 COIAS project framework

1.1.3 Detailed objectives of the project

1.2 Relationship with the Programme objectives

1.2.1 Technical aspects

1.2.2 Industrial aspects

1.3 Background - State of the Art

1.3.1 IPng

1.3.2 ATM

1.3.3 Satellite

1.3.4 Multimedia applications

1.3.5 Network management

1.4 Economic and social impact

1.4.1 ATM market projections

1.4.2 Internet market projections

1.4.3 Satellite market situation and projections

1.4.4 Project relevance

2. PROJECT PLAN

2.1 Technical Approach

2.2 Work Breakdown Structure

2.3 Work Package Groups description

2.3.1 WPG 1000 - Management

2.3.2 WPG 2000 - Global Internet Infrastructure

2.3.3 WPG 3000 - Validation platform and Trials

3. OVERALL PROJECT SYNTHESIS

3.1 Workshare List (Form M4B)

3.2 Work Package Activity Description (Form M4C)

3.3 List of Deliverables (Form M4D)

3.4 Deliverable Description (Form M4DD)

4. FIRST PROJECT YEAR DETAILED PLAN

4.1 Objectives for the current year

4.2 Work Breakdown Structure

4.3 First Year Activities Description

4.3.1 AC 1110 - Inter-projects co-ordination

4.3.2 AC 1120 - First Year Management

4.3.3 AC 2110 - User application requirements

4.3.4 AC 2120 - Service providers capabilities and requirements

4.3.5 AC 2210 - IPv6 and QoS Management

4.3.6 AC 2220 - IPv6 mobility

4.3.7 AC 2230 - Security policy and key management

4.3.8 AC 2240 - TCP and Reliable Multicast

4.3.9 AC 2250 - Alternate path routing

4.3.10 AC 2260 - Media servers

4.3.11 AC 2270 - Network Management

4.3.12 AC 2310 - First year of standardisation activities

4.3.13 AC 3110 - Platform architecture

4.3.14 AC 3120 - Validation strategy definition

4.3.15 AC 3210 - Protocol stack development

4.3.16 AC 3220 - Security software development

4.3.17 AC 3230 - Media servers development

4.3.18 AC 3240 - Multimedia Application adaptations

4.3.19 AC 3250 - Management software development

4.4 First Year Activity Description (Form M4C)

5. PROJECT MANAGEMENT STRUCTURE AND TECHNIQUES

5.1 Internal management organisation

5.1.1 Project Manager

5.1.2 Steering Committee

5.1.3 Work Package Technical Coordinators

5.2 Project meetings

5.2.1 Project Steering Meetings

5.2.2 Technical Interchange Meetings

5.2.3 Project Reviews

5.3 Internal information flow

5.4 Management of relations with other projects

5.5 Milestones

5.6 Consortium agreement

5.6.1 Preliminary rules of access to Background and Foreground material

5.6.2 Preliminary list of Background material

5.7 Contract management

5.7.1 Role of SP01

5.7.2 Role of SP02

6. EXPLOITATION PLANS

6.1 Partner P01

6.2 Partner P04

6.3 Partner P05

6.4 Partner P06

7. LIST OF ACRONYMS

 

  1. Project objectives and background
  2. A list of the acronyms used in this document is given in section 7.

    1. Objectives of the project
      1. The Global Internet Infrastructure
      2. At the present time, the booming of the Internet network around the world shows that we are on the way of building an Information Society that will be the pillar for world-wide economical, industrial and cultural exchanges in the early next century. This Information Society will clearly rely on the Internet technology that became a de facto standard in the past years for interconnecting remote applications. In parallel to the generalisation of Internet network and transport level protocols, namely IP and TCP/UDP, a strong R & D and industrial effort has led to the specification and deployment of infrastructure technologies (ATM, cable network, satellite, ADSL) which provide very high speed communications as well as quasi error free transmission quality down to the office and to the home. Some of them also provide wireless access to connect portable terminals and nomadic users. This gives the opportunity to build the Information Society above efficient heterogeneous infrastructure networks either wired or wireless and widespread network and transport protocols. This approach is known under the Global Internet Infrastructure (GII) terminology.

         

        If the availability of high speed infrastructure links is a prerequisite condition for the deployment of the GII, it is not a sufficient one. The GII has also to guarantee a satisfactory level of quality of service to make the new multimedia applications attractive. By quality of service, we understand efficient response time, guarantee of the service according to the provider's contract, high level of interactivity, secure transfers, transparency for the user that could access from different geographical areas using different types of terminals.

         

        The number of applications that could use this GII infrastructure is quasi unlimited. Current applications like electronic mail and file transfers would of course take benefits from high speed links and efficient response time. More interesting are the new ones. As a first example, the GII would make possible a true interactive and multimedia access to the Information Society. Applications such as interactive and multiparty games, tele-learning, tele-education would be more attractive than those developed today. As a matter of fact, the available quality of service for audio and video transfers clearly limits the field of potential applications. Enhanced Web servers associating high speed access and multimedia capabilities would boost electronic commerce that is very sensitive to the presentation of the product to be sold. Thanks to the mass introduction of the GII due to its low connection cost, industrial applications would also take advantages of the GII and the associated technologies. A lot of applications whose requirements are very stringent in terms of quality of service, security, real-time constraints will probably migrate over Internet protocols. Among others, we can give examples in the following fields: information systems for health care, military and factory command and control systems, air traffic management, distributed simulations, electronic news distribution, ...

         

        In terms of market, it is anticipated that the market for networked multimedia over a GII is likely to grow exponentially over the next few years and reach a size of trillions of ECU. This market includes the equipment necessary to bring the Information Society to the user (fixed or mobile terminals, home equipment like set top boxes, ...), infrastructure equipment and of course services. Such a market growth will only be possible if the level of quality of service expected by the users is provided by the GII.

         

      3. COIAS project framework
      4. The objectives of the GII architecture are therefore very ambitious. Do we have today the necessary technology to put this architecture in place ? A large number of them are today available but an essential technological brick can be considered as missing. The COIAS project aims at developing and demonstrating this brick.

         

        Following the approach depicted on the Figure 1, the COIAS project mainly focuses on developing and mapping the new generation of Internet protocols above up to date subnetwork technologies such as ATM and satellite while taking into account two main features for the Information Society: mobility and security. The impact of these new protocols on network management will be considered. At the application level, The COIAS project will study the impact of using the new generation of IP.

         

         

        Figure 1: COIAS project framework

         

      5. Detailed objectives of the project
        1. ATM and satellite networks

As mentioned before, new technologies have been developed to provide enhanced services at the infrastructure network level. The COIAS project has chosen two of these technologies that can be considered as two main pillars of the GII.

 

The first one is ATM that has been heavily supported by the EC through previous ACTS calls and is being deployed in Europe. One important feature of the ATM technology is the potential ability to provide point-to-point and point-to-multipoint VC with a specified QoS. From the operator point of view, ATM brings its scalability and flexibility in terms of traffic management in order to deliver to the user the exact expected level of performance.

 

The second technology that can be considered as complementary to ATM is the satellite. Satellite is being increasingly used in the Internet, for technical, economical and strategic reasons. Satellite is chosen whenever:

 

 

In addition, with the successful world-wide introduction of the DVB standard, satellite communications offer, today, at minimal cost for the receive terminals, very high-speed transmissions. Other emerging satellite technologies such as on-board demodulation and multiplexing also reduce the size and cost of equipment at the transmit site.

 

The main goal of the COIAS project will be to demonstrate how the GII can be engineered to get full benefit of ATM and Satellite networks and can satisfy the requirements of an increasing number of various applications, using the tools available with the new generation Internet protocols. The COIAS will therefore participate to the Internet - ATM - Satellite convergence and integration effort.

        1. Mapping Internet NG protocols above ATM and satellite networks

Internet protocols in their current version (TCP/UDP/IP v4) were originally designed 15 years ago for data transmission. At that moment, communications link layers offered low data rates and a high percentage of data loss. The goal of the Internet protocols was to ensure reliable transfers between two hosts. However, these protocols are not well suited to bring efficient network and transport services to satisfy the requirements of the applications to be supported by the GII.

 

The Internet protocols do not provide any QoS guaranty. This single-class, "best-effort", service works well with applications that do not have any real-time constraints such as electronic mail or file transfers, but has clear limitations during network congestion periods for interactive applications (telephony, videoconferencing, network games,...). This leads to new classes of service and a QoS signalling protocol being discussed in the IETF. Secondly, the current version of IP does not include efficient mechanisms for mobility and security management.

 

IPv6 is the core element of the new Internet technology and should be the target protocol towards all existing networks, including ISO and IPv4 based networks, will have to migrate. The IPv6 specification (RFC 1883) is today a Proposed Standard and is still subject to small evolutions. Nevertheless, the IPng IETF working group expects a Draft Standard at the beginning of 1998. But there are also a large number of related specifications with the status of Proposed Standard or even Informational Draft that need to be completed taking into account the results of the first experiments. The COIAS project will implement IPv6 including the security and the mobility features and experiment these new capacities. The COIAS network infrastructure will be one of the first IPv6 based network in the world and will provide important feedback before the completion of the IPv6 standardisation process and before the complete IPv6 deployment. The COIAS partners already involved in the IETF standardisation process will take benefit of the COIAS project results to enhance Proposed Standards. Two full partners of the COIAS consortium have already developed an IPv6 stack. These stacks will be used and completed during the project.

 

The issues related to the management of the QoS over an aggregation of ATM and Satellite networks fall into several general classes:

 

 

Most of these issues are subject to standardisation works, but most of them still require research activities and experiments feedback. The goal of the COIAS project will be to design up-to-date solutions to solve these issues and to experiment these solutions. The COIAS platform will include up-to-date version of routers provided by one of the Sponsoring Partners of the project. These IPv6 routers will include IntServ mechanisms and RSVP functions. Two full Partners and a Sponsoring Partner are already working on IP satellite transmissions. Their research and prototyping developments will be used in the COIAS project.

 

At the transport level, several problems have also to be solved. RM data transfer is probably the most complex one. Within the COIAS consortium three full partners are working on this subject and should bring their expertise to propose and implement a reliable multicast protocol that could be used for large groups of users. This protocol will have to run on asymmetric links such as the satellite ones. A TCP over satellite working group has been recently created at the IETF to standardise the specific protocol options required. This standardisation activity will be also followed by the COIAS consortium.

        1. Mobility
        2. Driven by the new wireless systems and services, the market for mobile terminals is rapidly growing. Considering that the mobility concept appeared recently, the current version of IP does not include mechanisms for its management. Solutions have been proposed but the results were disappointing because they induce traffic overhead and heavy processing tasks in the routers. More, the problems related to security have not been totally solved.

           

          The first step in the Internet NG specification was to include some basic mechanisms in the IPv6 standard in order to integrate the terminals automatically in the network. However, additional work has to be undertaken in liaison with the relevant IETF groups to allow automatic router handover, assignment of a new IP address without loss nor error, group management including mobile or security management.

        3. Security
        4. Nowadays, no one can imagine to provide network services without addressing the security problems, that is why a clear security policy has to be defined and security functions and protocols must be implemented. Thus a set of rules which constrains one or more sets of security-relevant activities of one or more sets of elements need to be defined as the fundamental security guidelines for COIAS. The COIAS platform will provide Authentication and Security (encryption) according to the latest research of the IETF IPSEC working group. This work includes also as couple of key management protocols, which cover just the handling of short-term session keys. Those protocols are not feasible to provide exhaustive certificate/key management in large scale environments. In particular the generation of key pairs, the certification of public keys and their distribution are not in the scope of those protocols. Clearly, the COIAS platform, as a heterogeneous distributed environment, requires a strong certificate infrastructure including distribution and revocation lists. Defining such an infrastructure is out of the scope of the IPv6 effort, therefore the security working group will strongly work on this topic. Furthermore authentication at the user level is required, because it cannot be provided by the IPv6 features.

        5. Network Management
        6. The involvement of different technologies in the COIAS project (ATM, Satellite, Internet) leads to the need of a network management centre that will offer integrated management functionality. The network management system of the COIAS platform will use, as a basis, the available management functions that exist in the network elements. At the network layer, the integration of the management services offered from the network elements will be performed. This integration will possibly need the development of gateway functions that will permit the network management layer to interact with network elements. The network management component of the COIAS platform will be mainly focused in configuration, fault and performance management areas.

        7. Applications

At the user access level, one major issue to address for the future Global Internet Infrastructure is probably the one of the access to Media Servers. The pull technology (WWW) as well as the push technology (broadcasting) require high performance and scalable media servers. These servers will be part of the infrastructure and could probably be the bottleneck of the future Internet services. Two of the COIAS full partners have already study this problem and bring their knowledge and developments to the project.

 

The COIAS project will take advantages of the last researches and developments in the networking domain and will evaluate the integration of these different technologies. So, one major phase of the project will be the trials phase. To specify these trials and to evaluate the results, representative applications will be used.

 

A first step will be to demonstrate individual applications that are representative of potential applications to run over the GII. These applications, audioconference and videoconference interactive tools, Web browsers, distributed games, distributed simulations using the DIS standard, will be provided by the consortium partners and will be very useful to measure the performances on the platform. In a second step, a GII representative application, mixing data, audio, video and security aspects, will be brought by a partner to evaluate the migration process between the current and the new generation of Internet protocols and test an operational application over an Internet NG network using the media server previously mentioned.

 

    1. Relationship with the Programme objectives
      1. Technical aspects

The 3rd ACTS call is clearly focused on two main technical objectives that are clearly addressed by the COIAS project:

 

 

 

To achieve the COIAS project objectives, close relationships will be established with the following standardisation bodies: ATM Forum, IETF. All the partners involved in the project R&D tasks, either industrial (P01, P05, SP02) or academic ones (P02, P03), have already made significant contributions to these organisations. This involvement will guarantee that the results of the COIAS project will be in accordance with the standardisation process thus guaranteeing a direct industrial impact of the R&D effort.

 

The objectives of the COIAS project therefore mainly address the 3rd ACTS call - Area3 - Task AC321 - (Convergence and Integration: ATM - Internet).

 

However the project has close connections with Tasks AC126 and AC419.

 

This task is mainly devoted to the creation of a European platform to achieve the interoperability between multimedia application. Since the COIAS project deals with protocol definition for interactive multimedia , transparency and interworking across heteregeneous platforms or QoS management, it can contribute to the goals of this task.

 

The goal of this task is to harmonise the R&D efforts regarding satellite communications led either in ACTS programmes or through other initiatives and to encourage the dissemination of the projects results. The COIAS project will give significant results concerning the applicability of the new Internet protocols to satellite communications, the validation of a Global Internet Infrastructure thanks to significant satellite multimedia and mobile trials. For these reasons, a close co-operation between the AC419 expert groups and the COIAS project will be particularly valuable.

 

The COIAS project may also have liaisons with other tasks from the 3rd ACTS call. An activity of the COIAS project is totally devoted to inter-projects relationships. It will identify connections with projects focused on other tasks and find ways of co-operation between projects. For example, the COIAS platform will be available for studying the migration of multimedia applications over the new generation of Internet protocols.

      1. Industrial aspects

The COIAS project has been built around clear industrial objectives that guarantee a direct use of R&D results.

 

P01 already develops a software stack for the new generation of Internet protocols. For P01, the COIAS project is an opportunity to add some new functions to its product line to handle communications over satellite links, to manage mobility or QoS over heterogeneous networks. The heavy activity in standardisation committees like IETF shows the interest of the industry towards these subjects.

 

The COIAS project also associates, as a Sponsoring partner (SP02), a major American player in the field of LAN interconnection. This company will put at the COIAS project partners' disposal the IPv6 router software as well as local support. It shows that the COIAS is directly connected to the market with a world-wide vision.

 

From the satellite network point of view, Sponsoring partner (SP01), has announced that providing advanced Internet satellite services will be one of its strategic future business. This partner is therefore interested in the COIAS project and will heavily support the project by providing significant infrastructure and equipment to the project.

 

P04 is an SME acting as independent IT security consultant in Germany. The main service offers include enterprise wide analysis and conception of security issues, the implementation of individual security solutions and the development of application-independent security modules (e.g. to provide end to end security - authentication, integrity and confidentiality), strong authentication techniques, digital signatures, key- and certificate management and smartcard solutions).For P04, the COIAS project is an opportunity to add new security techniques according IPv6 to their product range. Furthermore, the provision of a strong certificate infrastructure in a heterogeneous and distributed environment and the following trail and validation phase will give the possibility to improve implementation and maintenance of this infrastructure and the software modules to enhance user trustworthiness and acceptance.

 

P05 has a clear commercial objective to provide high quality services over the GII and is keen to see the ideas for adaptation and QoS handling proposed in this project, which will assist with reaching this objective, tested in a realistic way. P05 is therefore contributing an application scenario, knowledge of QoS and management requirements, and an application server to enable testing, together with test and integration expertise. P05 anticipates using the results of the project to improve its next generation products and services.

 

P06 is an SME acting as a network integrator and telecommunication services provider in Greece. Its main involvement is in Internet, X.25, Frame Relay, and ATM technologies. Building the network management components of the COIAS platform will help to further develop an integrated network management system that could work transparently of underlying network resources. This will give the opportunity to control and maintain its network infrastructure and offer to current and future customers better services. Since P06 is acting as an Internet service provider, he will also evaluate the pros and cons that new Internet technologies (IPng, RSVP) will offer to further development of Internet services.

 

For all these reasons, all the partners of the COIAS project have a strong commitment to develop Internet services over communication networks taking into account satellite communications, heterogeneous networks, mobility, security and to validate these services through significant and short-term industrial and multimedia applications.

    1. Background - State of the Art
      1. IPng

TCP/IP protocols in their current version 4 were originally designed 15 years ago for data transmission. At that time, communications link layers offered low data rates and a high percentage of data loss. The goal of these protocols was to ensure reliable transfers between hosts. Now, the need for multimedia (data, audio, video) applications has widely changed and high-rate technologies, such as the ones used in ATM network infrastructure and telecommunication satellites, provide a quite perfect quality of transmission. So, we better understand why the engineering community are redefining communication services and protocols. Simplicity, scalability and universality of IP were the keys of its success. It was designed in order to be easily implemented in a large range of networks from LANs to dial-up access via low-rate modems.

 

Starting from the quite simple TCP/UDP/IP version 4 model, the communication model for the new generation of Internet protocols has evolved to the more sophisticated one described in Figure 2. This evolution can be explained by:

 

 

 

Figure 2: INTERNET NG communication model

The first brick taking place at the network level layer of the model, is the IPv6 one. It brings:

 

Today, numerous proposed standards related to IPv6 have been defined in the IETF IPng working group and have still to be refined before getting the Standard status. The first IPv6 implementations on wide area platforms will provide results that will lead to the final standardisation step. In the US a first IPv6 +backbone (CAIRN) is going to be deployed and will interconnect major academic and industrial laboratories.

 

On top of the IP layer, we find the classical TCP and UDP transport layers that have been slightly adapted to the IPv6 version.

 

The large variety of application requirements imposes to define QoS classes. QoS classes have been defined first in ATM networks. For few years, the IETF has been defining the Internet IntServ and the RSVP signalling protocol. It is used to carry the booking information throughout the network, complies with the multicast data transfer requirements and allows a user to join an existing session. The goal of the QoS Manager is to define an API that would make the interface between RSVP and the user/application. The idea is the QoS Manager should propose the user/application few QoS classes with very simple and easily understandable QoS parameters so that the application does not have to be preoccupied with the detailed RSVP mechanisms.

 

The IntServ are aimed at defining the mechanisms to be implemented in the network nodes such as admission control and scheduling mechanisms. To be implemented over subnetwork technologies, the IntServ have to be mapped in order to take advantages of the under layer services. That is the role of the ISSLL. ISSLL have already been specified for ATM.

 

Three classes of service have been defined by the IETF:

 

For all these three classes, the mapping with the ATM services has been studied. It will also implement all the functions needed for the use of ATM such as the MARS and the Multicast Server. The use of large ATM clouds will lead to implement new mechanisms able to optimise the use of the ATM infrastructure. The solution consists in setting up shortcut route between the routers connecting to the ATM cloud, to minimise the number of routers when possible. It provides the best way to take advantage of the ATM infrastructure deployment.

 

The use of unidirectional satellite links, with the use of a terrestrial network for the return path of communication, introduces also new problems. This kind of asymmetric network has been studied for a couple of years by three partners. Their works have led to a proposed IETF standard.

 

Above transport layers, protocols adapted to the nature of the applications have been defined. The first one is RTP that has been specified to support audio and video transfers. Other protocols have not been specified yet. An other important feature of the new generation Internet protocol is the capability to provide enhanced transport functions and facilities whatever the network topology, and whatever the communication topology (point-to-point or multipoint) might be. RM data transport is a requirement for numerous applications. The applications used in the project have this kind of need. But that is also the case of many distributed applications that require coherent data bases, and also the case of applications using a publisher/subscriber model of communication (delivery of news, business information, stock exchange information...). To allow a future standardisation of RM protocols, a new IRTF working group has been created in December 1996.

 

      1. ATM
      2. The Asynchronous Transfer Mode mechanism has been adopted as the preferred transmission mechanism for the Broadband ISDN. It provides for VPs to be set up between nodes, VPCs between end nodes (each VP carrying some VCs). The VCs have been defined with CBR, VBR, ABR. The implementation status of some of these facilities is still variable amongst the different manufacturers. Irrespective of the bit rate being provided by the Carrier, the data rate offered in many real-time applications will vary over time. To accommodate this variability, the Carriers will often offer a service with a certain SCR and a different PCR. Many ATM switch and end-user implementations have difficulty in dealing economically with a wide variance between SCR and PCR; for this reason some switches and end-stations attempt to trade bandwidth for delay by appropriately «shaping» the traffic. It is possible to provide the facilities in the form of PVCs or SVCs. Finally, there are several forms of interface between the network and the end-stations.

         

        The main Carriers in Europe have been deploying ATM facilities partly on a research basis, in the JAMES network, and partly for commercial backbones. Some of the partners in this proposal have either been providing such facilities in a campus area, and some have been providing it on a wide-area basis. The first implementations were almost leased line replacements – with a very slow set-up period and a CBR traffic offering. More recently, VBR VCs and SVCs have started being provided. There is little problem with these facilities over the switches of single manufacturers; there are still some problems in good interworking between manufacturers in these areas.

         

        In some defence applications, it is the preferred approach to carry the 53 bytes ATM cells right to the end system – even for low speed tactical stations at a few Kbps data rates. For the commercial market, the range of applicability of ATM is less clear. For high bandwidth traffic, the possibility of dividing the traffic amongst a number of sets of users with guaranteed QoS is very attractive both to the users and to the Carrier. It is not clear, however, when the ATM should be terminated at the boundary to a LAN, or when it should be distributed as ATM further inside the customer’s premises. There are various mechanisms being developed in the IETF, particular under their IntServ stream, to allow IPv6 to achieve specified QoS. In this project we expect to pursue some of these ideas, to evaluate how best to meet the sort of applications demands being made on the lower level – be it IPv6 or the ATM level below.

         

      3. Satellite

The DVB standard is a remarkable success, not only in Europe where it is well established, but also in the rest of the world where it is gaining widespread acceptance. In Europe, it is THE standard for digital TV, DTH distribution. over Europe, there are already more than 500 DVB TV channels being beamed down from various satellites located within an geo-stationary orbital arc, serving approximately 1.5M homes (direct digital satellite reception) as of mid-1997. At least 4 other satellites dedicated to digital TV for Europe, are going to be launched into orbit by the end 1998, each satellite adding roughly 160 additional digital TV channels (at 4 Mbps per channel). DVB services are also rapidly deploying in America (North and South), Africa and South-East Asia. Thanks to this economy of scale, the DVB standard offers the benefit of very low-cost digital terminals not only for consumer applications but also for small business applications.

 

The DVB standard is based on a robust FEC scheme which is a concatenation of a Reed-Solomon code and a convolutional code. This combination of two FEC produces a brick wall curve for the error performance. The convolutional code offers in addition the possibility to trade-off between bandwidth and power requirements. Another parameter which is at the disposal of satellite system engineers is the symbol rate, or modulation signalling rate, which is intentionally not standardised by the DVB. This allows the standard to be optimised for various satellite characteristics and market requirements over the world.

 

The DVB set of standards covers more than just digital television broadcasting. The DVB finalised the specifications for IP over DVB in April 1997. This new standard is already extensively experimented in various system architecture:

 

In France, a public TV station for education and employment has deployed 20 experimental sites of a system which combines a DVB satellite high-speed delivery with a PSTN Web access to provide a VoD-like application for teachers and social workers. Without satellite, the connections of all secondary schools in France to the digital video database would not be economically viable.

 

In April 1997, during the EC-sponsored EUROMED conference, a technique close to the DVB standard to set-up a two-day demonstration of telemedecine connecting two LANs, one in Nice in the south of France the other in a five-star hotel in Cairo, Egypt. The satellite bandwidth was 2.4 Mbps, bidirectional. Only, satellite can provide this type of short-duration, short-notice and high-speed LAN-to-LAN connection.

 

In September 1997, the international SIGCOMM97 conference which took place in Cannes was retransmitted world-wide via the MBONE. Experimental DVB satellite links were used between the conference site (the uplink site) and two gateways in London and Darmstadt, which re-inject the IP Multicast datagrams received from satellite into the MBONE. Good quality of video and audio have been reported back from people connected to the MBONE world-wide (Europe, US, Japan, Australia,..).

 

To further enhance satellite connectivity, it is also of great interest to increase the number satellite transmit gateways (nodes which receive IP datagrams from a terrestrial interface, route them to the satellite interface which encapsulate them to the DVB-SIDAT standard). This can be realised by the use of SCPC, whereby each uplink transmits its data on a separate carrier (frequency). The different carriers are frequency multiplexed by the satellite. The SCPC technique requires however one demodulator board in the PC for the reception of each carrier.

 

      1. Multimedia applications

There are many different user applications that could be specified as using data transmission protocols. They have been developed to meet different user requirements. Nevertheless, the applications data transmission requirements can be generalised in terms of the type of data to be transferred. These data types are:

 

During the trials phase of the project, applications based on partners technologies or on commercial products will be used to evaluate the performances of the proposed GII. These applications will cover these data transfer types.

 

Today, the data communications are undergoing a period of revolutionary change towards real-time and multimedia. This deployment is based upon three enabling technologies:

 

These technologies allow widely-scaled use of audio and video applications over the network, and a smooth integration with the data processing ones. But, the problem for a wide dissemination of these new generation applications is the network capacity limitations:

 

Time-constrained applications are quite different from standard data applications and require service that cannot be delivered within the typical data service architecture. The following paragraphs present the characteristics of three categories of time-constrained applications.

 

Real-time audio and video

 

Digital video and audio require periodic updates of information to prevent the image or voice playback from degrading. Latency is the principal concern because of human perception limitations. Depending on the quality of signals transmitted, throughput demands can be very high. Compression is typically used to lower this throughput requirement. For video to appear normal, however, data must be digitised, compressed, transmitted, received, uncompressed and undigitalised within 1/30 of a second. The distribution of this type of data does require the reserving of net resources for the purpose of assuring a QoS level where, typically, latency and jitter are the constraints.

 

Video teleconference requires group formation policy that allows initiating a session, joining existing sessions, leaving a session without tearing it down if any participants remain connected, and terminating the session. It requires the capability to conduct a tightly-controlled N x N session if the number of participants is restricted; or, a loosely-controlled session in a session from 1 to N where the number of participants may be quite large. In any case, control over group membership must be available.

 

Interactive

 

Collaborative work tools, planning tools and distributed whiteboards are examples of interactive multimedia applications. A distributed whiteboard is a conferencing tool that distributes pages of a whiteboard such that any participant can draw on any page. The goal is to have consistent views across multiple platforms, therefore, the processes implementing the whiteboard must exchange the current state of the data. The operations that any participant performs on a page must be sequenced and timestamped. Each participant is both sender and receiver. Each member is responsible for detecting loss and reporting this to the group and for periodically informing the group of their place in the session. Repair requests could be multicast to the group and any member of the group could effect repair. This, in turn, requires the members of the group to have some concept of the distance to each participant in the group and to invoke an algorithm for repair that minimises responses to repairs. This can be satisfied by timestamping the status information multicast to the group. Priority is utilised to determine the importance of transmitting the current page, a new page, or repairs to a previous page. Data in these applications are characterised as reliable, duplicate free, ordered by source, and delivered within a finite period of time.

 

Distributed

 

Distributed simulations, situational awareness, real-time sensor data, virtual reality gaming, billing distribution, and the dissemination of stock quotes are examples of real-time data exchanges in this category. Any virtual environment among hosts in a distributed system that are simulating the behaviour of objects in that environment fit this category. Applications like distributed gaming and virtual reality require that terrain and environmental updates be distributed in a multicast fashion with low packet loss and low latency. Objects in this environment are capable of physical interaction and can sense each other by visual and other (sensor) means.

 

These applications are characterised by large scale memberships which need to share a consistent view of the game space even in the face of packet loss. In entertainment scenarios the number of simulated objects could exceed 100,000 where each object produces a real-time flow of 15 packets per second. Unlike applications like videoconferencing, these applications cannot tolerate frequent updates of data to guarantee freshness. Freshness is required yet updates necessarily are infrequent for objects like terrain updates. These applications are intended to work with input to and output from humans interacting with distributed simulators in real time. Human perception is the normal quantifier of latency requirements (approx. 100 milliseconds).

 

The distributed process control or replicated database are also this category. The distinguishing requirement is the need for total order. Application tasks could be divided among processors in a system and data replicated to protect against failures. There is a need to co-ordinate the tasks and reach consensus on state. Manufacturing process control needs to schedule processes distributed across the system. A consistent database is necessary to reach consensus.

 

      1. Network management
        1. General aspects

Effective and efficient Network management is important in any networking environment. In general network management enables the effective use of all available resources in the Network. There are five management functional areas defined by ITU.

 

 

        1. Internet management

The management protocol applicable in Internet stacks is SNMP. It retains the basic manager-agent model of interactions but simplifies the access mechanisms and the structure of management information. In fact, it realises a "remote debugging" paradigm. The SNMP object model does not support inheritance, packages, relationships etc. while actions and object creations/deletions have to be emulated by setting attributes in the absence of suitable access services. The whole framework is built around the concept of unreliable communications while polling as opposed to an event-based model is used to detect changes.

 

During the past several years, there have been a number of activities aimed at incorporating security and other improvements to SNMP. Unfortunately, strongly held differences on how to incorporate these improvements into SNMP prevented the SNMPV2 Working Group from coming to closure on a single approach. As a result, two different approaches (commonly called V2u and V2*) have emerged.

 

The SNMPv3 Working Group is chartered to prepare recommendations for the next generation of SNMP. The goal of the Working Group is to produce the necessary set of documents that will provide a single standard for the next generation of core SNMP functions:

 

Another approach that is under continuous research for the last two years is the integration of Java technology to network management. The Java approach is intended to overcome some of the problems of SNMP and reduce the complexity involved in network management. The current SNMP-based network management has significant disadvantages despite its wide usage in the Internet community. Some of these are communication overhead based on polling, low level of security and portability between different architecture. A lot of work has been done in building Java-based network elements that provides enhanced management functions. Sun is currently working on a project JMAPI with the aim to offer an integrated management API. Additionally gateways acting between Java and already defined management protocols like SNMP are available and offer solutions at the development of Web-based network management systems.

 

    1. Economic and social impact
      1. ATM market projections
      2. A recent Datamonitor ATM market study gives very interesting features about the business growth in this area.

         

        The first result confirms that the ATM technology will be the key one in the terrestrial WAN area compared to the Frame Relay one. The ATM revenue will reach $2.9 Billion in 2001, compared to $530 Million in 1996.

         

        The second one analyses the impact of the Internet on the WAN technology. The market growth will come from the Internet boom and the study foresees that 50% of the ATM WAN market will be made by ISP and IAP investments. The 155 and 622 Mbps ATM trunks seem to be very well suited to take up the Internet traffic growth up. Concerning the geographical distribution of the market, the areas where the market growth will be the most significant will be Asia / Pacific and Europe.

         

      3. Internet market projections
      4. At the moment, even if the main use of the Internet is still for mailing and browsing, there are some indicators showing that the market is starting to take off thanks to killer applications that will emerge in the next years like electronic commerce.

         

        Corporate Wide Web can give an impressive example of the market explosion (cf. Table 1, source Zona Research).

         

        Year

        Internet revenue

        Intranet revenue

        95

        0,5

        0,3

        96

        1

        2

        97

        1,3

        3,9

        98

        1,8

        8

        Table 1: Web servers revenues in $ bn

         

        Two thirds of US corporations versus 50% in Europe are implementing or planning Intranet products. This is due to the immediate and measurable advantages of the Internet technology to develop and distribute applications. As a matter of fact, this technology is available on every operating system, platform and database.

         

        Considering that the Internet will evolve soon (cf. Figure 3) from the current electronic publishing to a wide range of applications like electronic commerce, as soon as secure and robust transaction processing will be available, like co-operative work with the availability of high quality audio and video applications, we can imagine, by comparing the explosion of the market of corporate Web servers, that the market will be one of the most important in the next years.

         

        Figure 3: Internet usage evolution

      5. Satellite market situation and projections
      6. Compared to terrestrial networks, the satellite technology offers significant advantages for a large scale of Internet multimedia applications even with the existing technology that requires a return channel using another network, generally the dial-up PSTN/ISDN. This limitation does not seem to be a problem on a short term considering the level of interactivity of current applications.

         

        The satellite is first of all particularly well adapted in terms of bandwidth and cost to the broadcast of information that can be asynchronously consulted such as stock exchange rates, press agency messages, real estate agencies data, Web site mirroring. Consider for example an application which requires a throughput of 40 Gbytes per day. This bandwidth can be provided by a 4 Mbps link. The satellite capacity for this bandwidth costs about 1780 ECU per day, which translates into 0.045 ECU per transmitted Mbyte, that is comparable to the average cost of an off-peak 4-minute local call in most European countries (source: Eurodata Foundation, March 97). Note that with the DVB technology the necessary receive equipment for the mentioned 4 Mbps is just a consumer TVRO dish of 60cm to 90cm (depending on the geographical location) and a DVB receiver (300 ECU).

         

        This technology can also be very interesting for companies that do not still have WAN architectures or want to extend it on a large distance or for organisations that download one-way huge volumes of data like in the banking or insurance sectors. Consider for example the monthly cost of a 2 Mbps international leased lines in Europe which varies from 3500 ECU between Norway and Denmark to 34350 ECU between UK and Greece. The monthly cost of a 2 Mbps space capacity, about 25000 ECU, is more cost-effective than terrestrial networks when there are more than 7 international receive points, in any case, and more cost effective on average when there are more than 2 international receive points.

         

        For the consumer market, the satellite seems ideal for applications with a large number of subscribers like tele-education and tele-learning. This technology doesn't need any heavy infrastructure, can be deployed rapidly and progressively in terms of bandwidth and coverage to match the real demand and thus can ease the development of rural or less-developed areas. It can also be considered to extend existing applications to areas that do not have access to high speed communications. That's why taking into account the delivery of high quality multimedia services above heteregeneous networks is of prior importance.

         

        At the present time, video distribution remains the primary application for satellite networks. More than 20 million European homes can today receive TV programmes thanks to individual and collective equipment. The market growth is significant either in Europe or in the US.

         

        Since 1996, Internet services have been proposed over the satellite. As an example, Hughes Network Systems launched in June 96 the DirecPC service that makes possible the downloading of Web pages at a 400 Kbps speed after a request over the phone network. Several mass production programs are now launched by Internet satellite providers in order to provide the market with cost effective receiving solutions. The ability of such products like PC receiving boards around $300 in the next couple of years will certainly boom the market.

         

        There is also now a mass demand for global information exchange with bandwidth on demand requesting high speed transmissions to mobile and portable terminals. The satellite infrastructure has significant advantages to fulfil the users requirements. Mobility, high speed Internet access, effective response times, network coverage are the most important. Today, initiatives are being launched throughout the world and mainly in the US to develop world wide personal communications and multimedia broadband communications. Documents issued in March 97 by the EC foresees a market of $400 billion in the next ten years, around 60 % for the services offered over the network, around 30 % for terminals and the rest for the satellite segment.

         

        This market analysis shows that the technologies to be embedded in the satellite terminals to offer enhanced services are of prior importance for controlling the market.

         

      7. Project relevance

The first goal of the project is to bring efficient solutions to map a widespread technology like Internet whose current specifications are not able to provide the necessary level of service, with a new infrastructure technology, namely ATM, that includes all the requested features in its specifications. The COIAS project is focused on the development of missing elements that will drive to a true convergence between the new IP and ATM. New applications and services taking benefits from this convergence will be brought to the users.

 

Concerning satellite communications, the COIAS project aims at developing the technologies to be embedded in end systems in order to provide the market with added value services. Referring to the market analysis led by the EC, it is obvious that the COIAS project contributes to strengthen the European position on this key market. Only communication architectures based on the new generation of Internet protocols will be able to satisfy the users requirements in terms of mobility management, Quality of Service guarantee, security management. As the project deals with Internet network and transport layers, the proposed solutions will be easily transposable to future satellite technologies.

 

At last, the COIAS project includes comprehensive trials over a very wide platform. The results of the project will be therefore representative of a global Internet infrastructure thus guaranteeing a direct exploitation of the project results.

  1. Project Plan
    1. Technical Approach

The primary strength of the COIAS project comes from the team itself. The consortium relies on a close co-operation between well known and highly skilled research centres and major industrial and non-competitive partners including technology providers and end users. The COIAS project will take advantages of the knowledge and developments of the different partners to specify and build an efficient Internet Infrastructure that complies with the ongoing Internet standards.

 

Each project partner is already involved in the development of new generation communication products dealing with Internet, ATM or satellite. The existing prototype of the IPv6 protocol stack from P01 will be used at the beginning of the project and completed during the project. This stack will be available in both Unix and Windows environments. It will interoperate with the IPv6 routers provided by SP02 and will include security features from P04, QoS management features and protocol options for satellite communications from P02 and P03. At the application level, P05 brings its developments on media servers. P06 will bring its experience in the field of network management.

 

The COIAS project team intends to participate actively in the standardisation process and mainly in the IETF groups. This lead to disseminate the results of the R & D activities and get immediate feedback on the accuracy of the COIAS project technical choices.

 

Most of the Internet proposed standards related to IPng, RSVP, IntServ, IPSEC will be implemented within the project and tested over the COIAS platform. The results of this testing phase will be of prime importance to get new stables standards.

 

The project intends to address the major issues of the GII:

 

 

But one important issue is to define services really compliant with both service providers and end-users requirements. So, a first phase of the COIAS project will be devoted to the requirement definition.

 

The design phase will be the second step of the project. This phase will be led by two well known research labs and four industrial partners that are already working in the Internet and ATM domain.

 

The development phase will allow to provide IPv6 protocol stacks with the associated servers (address resolution server, multicast server), a key server and a media server.

 

The platform integration phase will lead to the availability of a European platform allowing the evaluation of a GII prototype network.

 

The trials phase will allow to analyse the performances of the implemented solutions and the accuracy of the technical choices. This trials phase will lead to a complete analysis of the results and to proposed evolution in the GII design when required.

 

The WP definition takes into account the experience of each partner. A clear leadership for each WP has been identify to allow an efficient project management. From the development point of view, each industrial partner will have the responsibility of well identify products:

 

 

This organisation minimises the risks. Moreover the use of commercial off the shelf hardware equipment minimise the development effort and the associated technological risks. Most of the development and integration platforms are already existing at the partners’ premises. These platforms will be completed and upgraded during the COIAS project. So, each partner will use well-known development and testing tools that will lead to optimise the project efficiency. Based on the fact that Internet ad ATM monitoring tools are now mature equipment, no specific testing tools will be needed for the trial phase. The use of commercial off the shelf tools will also minimise the risks.

 

Each individual partner will apply its own development quality procedures keeping in mind that commercial products will be derived from this first developments.

 

    1. Work Breakdown Structure

The COIAS project is based on the Work Breakdown Structure depicted in Figure 4. The project is structured around three WPG:

 

These WPG are themselves divided into eight WP that can be easily managed by an individual partner.

Figure 4: WP breakdown (WP level)

 

Figure 5 shows the inter-relationships between the different WP. The proposed duration for the COIAS project is 24 months.

 

Figure 5: Inter-relationships between WP

Figure 6 depicts the overall work schedule for the project and also shows the date of availability of the project deliverables..

 

Figure 6: Project and deliverables schedule

 

    1. Work Package Groups description
    2. In this section, a description of the different WPG is given in a free text form in order to show the coherence between the individual WP.

      1. WPG 1000 - Management

The management WPG includes the project management itself as well as the co-ordination with other ACTS projects related to with overlapping areas of interest. The COIAS organisation for management is clarified in section 5. The partners involved in the COIAS project are fully committed to respect this organisation that is necessary to manage efficient relationships between widely geographically distributed companies and research organisations.

 

The Project Manager is responsible for all the technical and financial aspects related to the project. For that purpose, the Project Manager will be in charge of updating:

 

 

 

As the trial phase is very important to validate the project results, the Project Manager will particularly take care of the trials schedule. The COIAS platform is wide and involves a lot of technologies, so the trials require an efficient organisation to be performed.

 

For important decisions, the Project Manager relies on the support of a Steering Committee including a representative of each partner. A co-ordinator for each WP is in charge of the work to be done for a technical task. This organisation seems to be a good trade-off between an efficient project management organisation and too heavy administrative procedures

 

The EC pays attention to the links between ACTS projects. A specific activity has been organised and placed directly under the Project Manager responsibility for that purpose. At the very beginning of the project, the Project Manager will release a document identifying the potential areas of co-operation and the way and schedule to put this co-operation in place. This document and the associated actions will be periodically updated.

 

      1. WPG 2000 - Global Internet Infrastructure
        1. WP 2100 - Service requirements
        2. The first phase of the COIAS project will be devoted to define the requirements of innovative applications requiring a Global Internet Infrastructure that guarantees an adequate level of service in terms of QoS, mobility, security, capabilities to transfer heterogeneous types of information over various kinds of transmission infrastructure according to application dependent criteria. A taxonomy of applications will be done in term of kind of transfers (stream, bulk, interactive), in term of topology (point-to-point, multi-point), level of quality, group management , level of security... These applications characteristics will be used in particular to specify the reservation and QoS management policies in the network.

           

          The user requirements have to be compared to the network capacities and also to the operators requirements in terms, for example, of management, security, reliability, billing... A global Internet Infrastructure must address both the users and the providers problems. That is why two activities, dedicated to both aspects of the problem, are defined in WP2100.

        3. WP 2200 - Network architecture design

WP2200 is dedicated to the network architecture design, and so to the choice and the specification of all the protocols that will be implemented in the COIAS project. The design phase will address at least the following points:

 

IPv6 over ATM

 

The first issue to be specified will be the way to manage multicast issues between IPv6 that relies on a low level layers multicast capabilities and ATM. Today, two options can be taken into account by MARS (RFC 2022) and the most adapted to the application requirements will be chosen. The second issue will be related to the way to aggregate IP flows over ATM network resources in order to optimize their use. Providing a guaranteed Quality of Service is of key importance for future networks architecture. The most important improvement brought by an ATM network is its ability to offer various levels of QoS at the low communication levels (CBR, VBR, ABR, SCR ,PCR). From another side, one of the main improvements of the new generation of Internet protocols is the introduction of flow label management at the network layer level in order to implement three defined levels of QoS (guaranteed, controlled load, best effort).

 

Concerning QoS management, this design phase will lead to specify how to map Internet IPv6 new features above an ATM network. This issue which is the core of the ATM - Internet convergence, is today studied in the IntServ over ATM Working Group that defines how to apply the Integrated Services. The defined mechanisms will be used to give information to signaling protocols like RSVP that are used to established routes all along the network elements (routers and end stations). As an ATM unified network architecture seems to be unrealistic, the Internet protocols need to take into account the different characteristics of an heterogeneous network such as the one the COIAS project relies on. This design work will also specify the necessary mechanisms to handle a defined level of Quality of Service in an heterogeneous configuration.

 

Mobile IPv6

 

This design activity will allow to specify the architecture selected to manage the mobility over an Internet network based on the IPv6 protocol. In a second step, the mechanisms the architecture relies on will be specified. Thanks to these mechanisms, the communications will be made in a transparent manner whether the Internet subscriber is mobile or not. A close connection will be made with the security management because mobility sets new problems in terms of security rules to apply. The work to be done will be coordinated with the standardization effort led in the Mobile IPv6 (IP Routing for Wireless/mobile Hosts) IETF working group.

 

Security policy and key management

 

The COIAS platform security requirements (WP2100), security policies for the COIAS platform will be specified. With respect to the policies, the required implementation steps will be deduced. The recommendations for a common security policy (may include different security profiles according to the different requirements) will include the following facilities:

 

To provide the highest possible availability of the CPKI, two different approaches will be investigated: redundant implementation of sensitive network components (active network equipment, CAs/RAs) or the usage of Caching and Revocation lists.

 

TCP and Reliable Multicast

 

TCP performance over satellite links may not be optimal. Specific protocol enhancement are proposed within the IETF TCP over Satellite working group. We will participate to evaluation of these mechanisms in order to propose a suitable mechanism to be used within COIAS.

 

Layered-based multicast transmission schemes are the best way to handle heterogeneity of receivers and link capacities. A lot of research and experimentations are currently done to use layered-based schemes to transmit non-reliable multimedia data (such as audio and video). We will focus on such schemes to transmit reliable data (such as files). In fact, receiver heterogeneity is a very important problem in the optic of hybrid networks (e.g. satellite- and terrestrial- based links).

 

Alternate path routing

 

Once the natures of the networks, which will be available in the trials, have been established, we are in a position to specify the complex routing, which will be possible. This design activity will define the choice of mechanisms that we intend to implement in the gateways, and the routing strategies we plan to support in the routers. The mechanisms for routing, reliable multicast, authentication and network interconnection all have a mutual interaction. This activity will specify the architecture, including what mechanisms are immutable, and where choices must be allowed to enrich the possible experimentation.

 

Network management

 

Once information on the network components that will take part in the COIAS trials and service provider requirements are available we will specify the network management system that will support COIAS platform. A study on advantages and disadvantages on two different approaches for Internet stacks management and an early stage specification of the supported functionality of the COIAS network management system will be part of this WP.

 

Media server and GII application

 

The application is an E-commerce one based on the media server to be developed in the project. The media server will be NT based. It will implement access control, event management, resource sharing and billing in a realistic manner often using the same tools.

 

The application will emulate commercial e-commerce products and will include video, audio, dynamic pages and database access. This will enable the project to demonstrate the benefits of its work in a context which is realistic and well understood, without creating problems with permission to edit the commercial product. The integration issues this raises will therefore be extremely real. In common with P05's commercial products the application will require minimal client functionality (just a modern browser with support for Java, frames, SSL, etc.) since client configuration is a major cost in services designed for millions of untrained users. Similarly the application will not support any requirement for intervention at the client by the user through the GUI tools since this would require significant outlay on help/support. This will not prevent partners from providing additional GUI for experimental purposes. The application will have its own management system based on operating requirements derived from current services

 

        1. WP 2300 - Standardisation

Finally, WP2300 is dedicated to the standardization activity. This WP is of prime importance due to the fact that the great majority of the protocols that will be implemented during the project do not have the status of standard, and some have no existence. The majority of the project partners is already involved in standardization activities at IETF, ATM-Forum, ETSI... and know very well these organizations and how to work in the working groups. The COIAS project will provide the opportunity to demonstrate the involvement of Europe in the New generation Internet deployment.

 

The project team intends to work in close relationship with the following IETF working groups:

 

 

      1. WPG 3000 - Validation platform and Trials

Validation and demonstration of the R&D work done in the WPG 2000 is of prior importance for an ACTS project. As the COIAS project brings into play a lot of technologies, careful attention will be paid to that subject. A comprehensive platform distributed over Europe will be put in place to support the trials planned to verify the choices in terms of:

 

        1. WP 3100 - Platform definition

A first idea of the validation platform used for the COIAS project is depicted Figure 7. It gives its main features and this architecture will be refined during the WP3100. This European platform relies on a WAN based on two kinds of infrastructure technologies:

 

 

 

The partners' INTRANET networks will be interconnected through this WAN infrastructure thanks to commercial routers including IPv6 routing functions. This software will be provided by SP02 without any contribution from the EC. Each INTRANET network includes a comprehensive set of computers (workstations, PCs) running under various environments (UNIX, Windows). P01, P02 and P03 will make available their IPv6 stack and related protocols for end system software development as well as their in-house available applications (audioconferencing, visioconferencing, mail, browsers, distributed simulations). These applications will be used in first integration and validation steps as well as for basic demonstration purposes.

 

At the P01 premises, a local network infrastructure built around ATM switches from different vendors will be used. This ATM backbone network interconnects LAN thanks to ATM/Ethernet switches. The platform also includes WLAN based on two different technologies. A first one in the 2GHz frequency range providing a 2 Mbps data throughput will be used. A second one, the recent ETSI HIPERLAN standard, will provide up to 20 Mbps data rates using transmissions within a 5GHz frequency range. Products compliant with the HIPERLAN standard are being developed by P01 and will be available for the COIAS project platform. The P01 network interconnects workstations and PCs running under UNIX, AIX, Windows environments. Regarding the connectivity of this platform with other partners ones, ISDN links are now available and P01 plans to connect this platform to an ATM infrastructure in 1998. Throughout its INTERNET protocols developments, P01 is also connected to the 6Bone network by a router including a firewall and security management functions.

 

P02 has installed its own platform including LAN, ATM and a WLAN provided by NEC (25 Mbps), and is experimenting the support of an Internet videoconference application on a global network with wireless links. Problems such as high level versus low level FEC and multicast congestion and error control are studied in this context. P02 will have access to a national ATM network through a regional platform. P02 will also have access to the MIRIHADE platform in a collaboration with French research centres. This platform will allow us to evaluate the ATM technology, but also to design mechanisms for end-to-end resource control on heterogeneous network with IPv6 as the interoperability level.

 

At the P03 premises, there will be an ATM infrastructure inside the site, with gateway facilities to the outside world. We hope that this infrastructure will provide ATM connectivity to two other partners. It is clear that there will be such connectivity to P05, at high speed; at least 155 Mbps will be available using the LEARNET facilities. P03 will also have access to JAMES network, as long as some variant of that is being provided; this should allow access to P02 via RENATER, but this is less certain. P03 will be running both an ISDN and a mobile radio IP gateway. The P03 mobile facilities will be at the least WAVELAN equipment with a capability of 2 Mbps; there will probably be other forms of mobile equipment with both higher capacity and broader range lower capacity (GSM).

 

A media server and a cache will be available at P05 premises. This will be connected to the internal LAN (switched Ethernet and ATM backbone). P05 will also connect with P03 via LEARNET, an ATM wide area broadband research net.

 

P04 will interconnect its Intranet to the platform through available ISDN links.

 

The network management system will be available at the P06 premises. This will be connected to the internal LAN and through P06 international connectivity used in the COIAS project. P06 will use ATM LAN infrastructure located in its premises at the trials phase of the project. The P06 network interconnects workstations and PCs running under UNIX, Solaris, Windows environments. P06 could also use an already established internal backbone that presently connects three POP. This backbone is currently used to offer connectivity services to large corporations. Regarding the connectivity of P06 platform to other partners platforms international connectivity (2 Mbps) to London and Paris is already existing and is planned to be upgraded in 1998.

 

As the COIAS platform integrates a very large number of components, the WP3100 will define the integration steps. These steps will follow a bottom - top approach, firstly for individual INTRANET integration then for the WAN platform integration. This integration will begin on a partner to partner basis and then will go on with the whole platform integration.

 

The WP3100 will also define the validation strategy including the following actions:

 

A document including the test forms will be issued with a preliminary test schedule. This schedule will give a first idea of the necessary logistics to perform the tests. It will be updated later during the platform integration in order to take into account the latest information in terms of resource availability and communication costs.

 

        1. WP 3200 - Platform development

This WP3200 is devoted to the implementation of the seven main functions identified and specified in the WP2200 and required for a Global Internet Infrastructure.

 

Compared to the WP2200, the distribution between the different activities is driven by implementation purposes. The work will be therefore divided as follows:

 

 

 

 

 

 

After testing, all these software components will be distributed between the partners according to the COIAS platform definition. The partner in charge of the development will bring its support to the others for installation, configuration and test.

        1. WP 3300 - Trials campaign
        2. After having defined the platform and developed the missing elements to build the Global Internet Infrastructure, we will then set up a trial campaign.

           

          This WP will of course begin by the whole platform integration following the different steps defined in WP3100. A report will be issued describing the results, the encountered problems and the proposed solutions to overcome these possible problems.

           

          Then, considering the width of the COIAS platform, the planning for trials campaign will be refined in order to be sure that all the logistics and resources are available to perform all the test plan. In WP3100, we provided the planning for the early trials in the project. In WP3300, we will review the components that were developed for the earlier trials, and any shortcomings found in the tests for functionality of the separate components. There will then be a revised set of tests for the integration of the components for the final trials. We will review to what extent the network connectivity of the partners may have improved, to determine whether the distributed testing strategy can be strengthened. The WP3300 will detail how the testing and measurement can be strengthened in the light of the recent developments.

           

          In WP3100, we identified the different elements of the infrastructure and the application systems that need to be monitored. We described the test scenarios, the parameters that must be measured, and how the tools should be synchronised. As a result of practical experience with the applications components and the networks, we may have had to modify the testing scenarios. The WP3300 will detail the testing finally carried out, and results of the testing found. The issued report will be sufficiently detailed to attribute performance criteria to the different components of the trials – thus assisting the trials analysis.

           

        3. WP 3400 - Trial results evaluation

The WP3400 will verify that the network architecture proposed in WP2200 is able to satisfy the service requirements defined in WP2100. The trials performed in WP3300 will be used to qualify and quantify this ability.

 

A first part of the WP3400 will compare the user requirements listed in WP2100 to the trials results. For each identified class of service, this comparison will be based on quantitative and qualitative aspects. In case of mismatches between the expected results and those obtained, a critical interpretation will be given.

 

Secondly the WP3400 will give a feedback on the architecture design. The capacity to extend to apply the results obtained on the COIAS platform to a more general architecture will be analysed and discussed. For the main issues studied in the project (QoS management, security management, mobility, alternate path routing, network management, reliable multicast, IP over satellite, media server), the WP3400 will show that the chosen options during the specification and design phases are relevant for an efficient convergence between Internet and ATM, for using the new generation of Internet protocols over an heterogeneous architecture including satellite links. The WP3400 will give some guidelines about the appliance of the project results to future satellite technologies.

 

A road map to implement these solutions in commercial products will also be proposed.

 

Figure 7: COIAS platform architecture

  1. Overall Project Synthesis
    1. Workshare List (Form M4B)
    2. Following the Work Breakdown Structure described in chapter 2, the hereafter table summarises according the M4B form the participation of each partner WP per WP and for the whole project.

       

      Form M4B to be inserted.

    3. Work Package Activity Description (Form M4C)

After the detailed description of the WPG and WP in section 2, they are hereafter summarised using the M4C forms.

 

Forms M4C to be inserted:

    1. List of Deliverables (Form M4D)
    2. The hereafter table lists the COIAS project deliverables using the M4D form.

       

      Form M4D to be inserted.

    3. Deliverable Description (Form M4DD)

The contents of each deliverable are detailed using the M4DD forms.

Forms M4DD to be inserted.

  1. First Project Year Detailed Plan
    1. Objectives for the current year

During the first year, all the WPG will be in progress.

 

The following WP will be concluded:

 

The WP 2200 (Network Architecture Design) and WP 3200 (Platform Development) will be in progress and will be concluded during the second year of the COIAS project. The general WP related to project management (WP 1100) and standardisation activities (WP 2300) will be of course in progress.

 

The WP3300 (Trials Campaign) and WP 3400 (Trial Results Evaluation) WP will only begin during the second year of the project.

    1. Work Breakdown Structure
    2. The figure 6 gives the Work Breakdown Structure down to activity level.

       

      Figure 8: Work Breakdown Structure (activity level)

    3. First Year Activities Description
    4. The effort of each partner for the finished or on-going activities after the end of the first project year is summarised in Table 2. Then, each first year activity is individually described.

       

      Partner Code

      Activity Code

      Activity Title

      Man Months

      P01

      1110

      Inter-projects co-ordination

      4

       

      1120

      First year management

      8

       

      2210

      IPv6 and QoS management

      3

       

      2220

      IPv6 mobility

      3

       

      2240

      TCP and reliable multicast

      1

       

      2250

      Alternate path routing

      2

       

      2270

      Network management

      3

       

      2310

      First year of standardisation activities

      3

       

      3110

      Platform architecture

      3

       

      3120

      Validation strategy definition

      2

       

      3210

      Protocol stack development

      14

       

      3220

      Security software development

      2

       

      3240

      Multimedia application adaptations

      2

       

      3250

      Management software development

      2

         

      Total:

      52

      P02

      2120

      Service providers capabilities and requirements

      2

       

      2210

      IPv6 and QoS management

      1

       

      2220

      IPv6 mobility

      1

       

      2240

      TCP and reliable multicast

      3

       

      2250

      Alternate path routing

      2

       

      2310

      First year of standardisation activities

      1

       

      3120

      Validation strategy definition

      1

       

      3210

      Protocol stack development

      5

         

      Total:

      16

      P03

      2110

      User application requirements

      1

       

      2210

      IPv6 and QoS management

      1

       

      2220

      IPv6 mobility

      2

       

      2230

      Security policy and key management

      2

       

      2240

      TCP and reliable multicast

      2

       

      2260

      Media servers

      4

       

      2310

      First year of standardisation activities

      2

       

      3110

      Platform architecture

      2

       

      3120

      Validation strategy definition

      2

       

      3220

      Security software development

      4

       

      3230

      Media servers development

      8

         

      Total:

      30

       

       

      Partner Code

      Activity Code

      Activity Title

      Man Months

      P04

      2220

      IPv6 mobility

      1

       

      2230

      Security policy and key management

      4

       

      2310

      First year of standardisation activities

      1

       

      3120

      Validation strategy definition

      1

       

      3220

      Security software development

      2

         

      Total:

      9

      P05

      2110

      User application requirements

      1

       

      2120

      Service providers capabilities and requirements

      1

       

      2260

      Media servers

      1

       

      2270

      Network management

      1

       

      3110

      Platform architecture

      1

       

      3120

      Validation strategy definition

      1

       

      3230

      Media servers development

      3

       

      3240

      Multimedia application adaptations

      3

         

      Total:

      12

      P06

      2270

      Network management

      8

       

      2310

      First year of standardisation activities

      1

       

      3110

      Platform architecture

      3

       

      3120

      Validation strategy definition

      2

       

      3250

      Management software development

      5

         

      Total:

      19

      Summary

      1110

      Inter-projects co-ordination

      4

       

      1120

      First year management

      8

       

      2110

      User application requirements

      2

       

      2120

      Service providers capabilities and requirements

      3

       

      2210

      IPv6 and QoS management

      5

       

      2220

      IPv6 mobility

      7

       

      2230

      Security policy and key management

      6

       

      2240

      TCP and reliable multicast

      6

       

      2250

      Alternate path routing

      4

       

      2260

      Media servers

      5

       

      2270

      Network management

      12

       

      2310

      First year of standardisation activities

      8

       

      3110

      Platform architecture

      9

       

      3120

      Validation strategy definition

      9

       

      3210

      Protocol stack development

      19

       

      3220

      Security software development

      8

       

      3230

      Media servers development

      11

       

      3240

      Multimedia application adaptations

      5

       

      3250

      Management software development

      7

         

      Total:

      138

      Table 2: Partners effort during the first project year

      1. AC 1110 - Inter-projects co-ordination

 

Starting event

 

 

Deliverables

 

 

Description

 

This activity is devoted to the co-ordination of the COIAS project with other identified ACTS projects.

 

Objectives

 

The objectives of this activity are to disseminate as largely as possible the technical objectives of the COIAS project in order to find as soon as possible in the course of the project areas of co-operation with other ACTS projects.

 

Technical Approach

 

The management of relations between COIAS and other projects is directly placed under the responsibility of the Project Manager. At the very beginning of the project he will establish direct contacts with other ACTS projects in order to identify a first list of projects.

 

After this first step, he will focus on the most promising ones and will issue a document describing the selected projects, the area of co-operation with other projects, the expected benefits as well as the impacts in terms of results, schedule and costs.

During the project he will participate in periodic concertation meetings. Particular attention will be paid to projects selected in the AC126 and AC419 ACTS third call tasks since their goals seem to be very complementary to the AC321 ones.

 

In order to keep the EC informed, the status of the relations with other projects will be summarised in a section of the Management Control Report. It will be detail in the Progress Report.

 

      1. AC 1120 - First Year Management

 

Starting event

 

 

Deliverables

 

 

Description

 

This activity is devoted to the COIAS project co-ordination vis-à-vis the EC.

 

Objectives

 

The goals of this activity, placed under the responsibility of the Project Manager, are to co-ordinate and supervise the partners activities to maintain technical progress, schedule and costs as necessary to achieve the project objectives. As authorised representative of all Partners, the Project Manager maintains the primary interface with the Commission for the submission of deliverables, for technical verification and audits and for any other required clarification or justification.

 

Technical Approach

 

The overall management of the COIAS project is directly placed under the responsibility of the Project Manager. He is responsible for:

 

 

To minimise any risk during the course of the project, the Project Manager is in charge of setting up a risk management chart at the very beginning of the project.

 

Thanks to these permanent monitoring activities, he will be able to decide corrective actions in a timely and cost effective manner. For important decisions, he will be helped by the Steering Committee.

 

      1. AC 2110 - User application requirements

 

Starting event

 

 

Deliverables

 

 

Description

 

This activity is devoted to the identification and definition of the GII applications requirements, from an end-user viewpoint.

 

Objectives

 

This activity will characterise the GII user application requirements in order to have a reference for the trial phase. The results of the trials will be compared to the requirements in order to verify the relevance of the work done within the project.

 

Technical Approach

 

The process will follow this path:

 

 

The COIAS partners will use their background gained in Internet applications development. The user requirements characterisation will be used as a reference during the rest of the project.

 

      1. AC 2120 - Service providers capabilities and requirements

 

Starting event

 

 

Deliverables

 

 

Description

 

This activity will give a detailed description of the services offered by the infrastructure networks selected for the COIAS project, from a network operator and service provider viewpoint.

 

Objectives

 

The goal of this activity is to characterise the services to be offered by the infrastructure network in order to compare them with the user application requirements.

 

Technical Approach

 

The work will be shared in two parts, each one corresponding to one of the selected infrastructure network - ATM and Satellite.

 

For each network and for different corresponding communication costs, the following information will be given:

 

 

The activity will also precise the requirements of the network operators and service providers in terms of network management, exploitation and billing.

 

      1. AC 2210 - IPv6 and QoS Management

 

Starting event

 

 

Deliverables

 

 

Description

 

In this activity, we will specify the way to map IPv6 with ATM and satellite facilities, the mechanisms necessary to handle the ATM VCs and set up shortcut route between nodes. We will also defined the IntServ mechanisms, their link with the RSVP protocol and the QoS manager.

 

Objectives

 

The objectives of this activity are to specify:

 

 

Technical Approach

 

Starting from the definition of the Internet QoS classes (guaranteed, controlled load and best effort), we will specify the required functions and mechanisms to implement in the end-systems as well as in the routers. These mechanisms will have to be compliant with the RSVP and IntServ proposed standards. A particular attention will be given to the definition of the API and of the QoS manager.

 

Among the QoS mechanisms we will define: the admission control mechanisms, the policy control mechanisms, the classifying and scheduling mechanisms. For that we will propose a way to use the IPv6 priority and flow label fields.

 

About the coupling between IP and ATM, this phase will allow to specify the way to aggregate IPv6 flows over VCs, the management of the VCs to allow RSVP traffic, and the set-up of shortcut routes to optimize the use of the ATM technology. These specifications will be driven in relationship with IETF and ATM-Forum standardization efforts. The QoS translation between the Integrated Services and ATM will follow the current proposed standard.

 

For the multicast data transfers, we plan to use a MARS server. This server could be completed to managed not only ATM based station addresses, but also satellite based station addresses. On ATM, a multicast server architecture will be used to provide multicast services.

 

      1. AC 2220 - IPv6 mobility

 

Starting event

 

 

Deliverables

 

 

Description

 

In this activity we will specify the facilities that must be supported by the GII to allow the use of mobile stations or of mobile users.

 

Objectives

 

The objective of this activity is to specify the necessary functions and mechanisms required by a mobile station or a mobile user to set up communications with the GII.

 

Technical Approach

 

When mobile computers move and attach themselves to new networks within the GII, they can use mobile-IP as a means to achieve seamless roaming transparently to application software. Mobile IPv6 takes advantage of the mobile IPv4 experience and provides smooth solutions to manage mobility. These solutions take advantages of new IPv6 features such as the management of the anycast addressing.

 

Starting from the mobile IPv6 draft specification we propose to specify the complementary functions required by host stations and routers to provide mobile access points to the GII. Several ideas have been proposed. As an example, we plan to investigate the Logical Addressing concept whose goal is to specify an intermediate layer between the transport protocol and IP in order to transfer information in a transparent way. The intermediate layer allows to manage the correspondence between the logical layer and physical addresses that may change if some of the subscriber are mobile.

 

      1. AC 2230 - Security policy and key management

 

Starting event

 

 

Deliverables

 

 

Description

 

In the frame of this activity we will specify the functionality of the security infrastructure, which must be provided to implement a secure platform and the impacts to the COIAS network according to the demands coming from the services requirements.

 

Objectives

 

The objectives of this activity are to specify the architecture to be provided in COIAS from the viewpoint of providing a security infrastructure to meet the requirements of a common security policy. The specification of a COIAS security policy should meet the requirements of D1 (application) and D2 (service provider).

 

Technical Approach

 

Security policies represent a set of selected security countermeasures. For information purposes a security policy also reflects the security requirements which are enforced by security measures. Therefore, a security policy can be understood as a catalogue or a list of security measures together with corresponding security requirements. Based on the result of the requirement analysis (WP2100) the security policies for the COIAS platform will be specified as well as the required technology for implementation.

 

Inter-domain security policies require the availability of an infrastructure with certification and registration authorities as well as key distribution services based on the concept of Public Key Cryptography. According to the ISAKMP framework, the OAKLEY-approach will be used to grant user and host authentication supported through negotiation, establishment and management of SA between the communicating entities. The implementation of these protocols is based on ISAKMP version 6 and ISAKMP+Oakley version 2 (depending on the availability of that implementation for the COIAS target platform and for the active network components (routers)).

 

ISAKMP does not specify the protocols for communicating with the TTP or certificate directory services. These protocols are defined by the TTP and directory services themselves and are out of the scope of the ISAKMP specifications.

 

However, the verification through certificates is required and must be provided through the CPKI. Host certificates can be provided through the enhanced DNSEC (RFC 2056). User authentication requires CA and RA to be located in the COIAS network.

 

To provide the highest possible availability of the CPKI, two different approaches have to be investigated: redundant design and implementation of sensitive network components (CAs/RAs) or the usage of Caching and Revocation lists.

 

      1. AC 2240 - TCP and Reliable Multicast

 

Starting event

 

 

Deliverables

 

 

Description

 

This activity will described the mechanisms for enhancing the performance of TCP and RM in a hybrid satellite/terrestrial network.

 

Objectives

 

The objectives are to describe the design and the implementation of these mechanisms.

 

Technical Approach

 

We expect to require a range of services for the applications being pursued here. Some of these, like audio and video, require a reasonable QoS – but not reliable transmission. Some of the point-to-point services must be reliable; for these TCP is probably adequate. TCP can provide reliable transmission, but it can be a very inefficient mechanism if there are large variations in QoS in constituent parts of the path. For this reason, we expect to explore some of the window control strategies developed in UC Berkeley for dealing with mobile systems. These adopt different window management systems, and have the gateway play an active part in the flow management.

 

Another set of services will require RM; here it is very inefficient to request retransmission from the source of the transmission; it is much more efficient to request it progressively up the multicast tree. This is the technique used in one form in the Shared WhiteBoard tool, and in another way in the Network Text Editor. A number of mechanisms for achieving reliable multicast have been proposed; indeed the September IRTF meeting in Cannes have been devoted entirely to this subject. Several of the mechanisms, which have been proposed by the IRTF, will be investigated further in this activity to assess their relevance to these applications.

 

      1. AC 2250 - Alternate path routing

 

Starting event

 

 

Deliverables

 

 

Description

 

For the COIAS targeted applications, many forms of network can be used from a given end-station; these may include satellite, terrestrial and mobile. Some of the end-stations will be able to use mobile and satellite; which is more appropriate depends on a complex interplay of QoS, tariff and service parameter considerations. We will deliberately introduce situations where such alternate paths would be possible, and develop techniques by which optimal routes would be adopted -within the constraints proposed.

 

Objectives

 

The objectives of this activity are to specify the architecture to be provided in COIAS from the viewpoint of providing alternate path capability .to meet specific requirements. The specifications should both meet the requirements, and be sufficiently complete to allow a further implementation phase.

 

Technical Approach

 

Once the natures of the networks, which will be available in the trials, have been established, we are in a position to specify the complex routing, which will be possible. This will incorporate the choice of mechanisms that we intend to implement in the gateways, and the routing strategies we plan to support in the routers. The mechanisms for routing, reliable multicast, authentication and network interconnection all have a mutual interaction. We will specify the architecture – including what mechanisms are immutable, and where choices must be allowed to enrich the possible experimentation.

 

      1. AC 2260 - Media servers

 

Starting event

 

 

Deliverables

 

 

Description

 

In this activity, we will specify the facilities, which must be provided in the media servers, and the architecture required for their performance.

 

Objectives

 

The objectives of this activity are to specify the architecture to be provided in COIAS from the viewpoint of providing media servers to meet specific requirements. The specifications should both meet the requirements, and be sufficiently complete to allow a further procurement or an implementation phase.

 

Technical Approach

 

In this activity, we will describe detailed components of the multimedia server prototype. Clearly the prototype must meet the applications requirements of D1 and the Service Provider capabilities of D2. It is expected that the server will be derived from an existing product with its own documentation; hence our first activity will be to survey the status of existing multimedia products – both from the partners and from commercial vendors. The aim will be to have a good understanding of what products could form the base for the COIAS multimedia servers. We will then link with the other activities in this activity, to ascertain their needs in a server.

 

The Server must provide many functions; some of them are defined below:

 

These functions will require considerable expansion in the light of the other activities in WP2200; thus there will be strong liaison with those carrying out these aspects. We expect that many of the functions will be achievable with a centralised server; indeed at least one centralised server will be required. In addition, some of the media serving may be best done in a distributed fashion – particularly when the interconnecting data networks cause delays and act as communications barriers. For this reason, part of the media serving will include a distributed architecture, where a central server controls proxies. Sometimes the data must obey particular protocol conventions; it remains to be decided to what extent these protocols will be embedded in the data, and to what extent the players will need to be designed to obey the relevant protocols. In the Server architecture, we will pay particular attention to the protocol activities of the MMUSIC group in the IETF, with their RTSP – though we will look carefully to what extent the RTSP assumed environment matches the COIAS applications.

 

      1. AC 2270 - Network Management

 

Starting Event

 

 

Deliverables

 

 

Description

 

In this activity we will specify the functionality and the architecture of the network management system that meets the requirements coming from WP2100.

 

Objectives

 

The objectives if this activity are the following:

 

 

Technical Approach

 

Having in mind service requirements coming from WP2100 and in parallel with information on network elements (MIBs, supported management protocols) we will obtain from other activities inside WP2200, we will start specifying the required functionality of the network management system.

 

Service requirements and standards related to human-computer interfaces will also affect the design of the user interfaces of the COIAS network management system.

 

Interaction of the network management system with other components of the COIAS platform (e.g. alternate path routing) will also be studied and specified.

 

      1. AC 2310 - First year of standardisation activities

 

Starting event

 

 

Deliverables

 

 

Description

 

Assessment of the standardisation activities in a number of relevant Standards bodies in relation to the activities being pursued in this project.

 

Objectives

 

The main objective of this activity is to ensure that our activities are consistent with the relevant standards that are being developed both inside, and outside the ACTS programme.

 

Technical Approach

 

In general the ACTS programme is pioneering the field of B-ISDN, and the relevant standardisation is carried out mainly in the context of the relevant ITU-T, ETSI and ATM Forum bodies. While the main activity in the IETF was IPv4, and its many related protocols, this was a valid approach; it was clear that the Internet of that generation was unable to provide the QoS required for the B-ISDN. Now, however, the IETF is moving towards IPv6, and there are many relevant activities in Routing, Mobility, Transport Resource Reservation, Multicast and Security, which have a direct bearing on the work of this project. We expect to participate strongly in those aspects of the IETF, which impinge on this project in two ways. We will ensure that we take due note of the advances being made in the IETF to guard against our going in a lone direction, and we will ensure that the relevant protocol results are fed back into the IETF to influence its directions. Here we will capitalise on the excellent relationships particularly the academic partners in the project already have with the IETF. Many of the partners to this proposal already participate in ETSI and the ATM Forum; we do not anticipate increasing our involvement with these bodies; we do, however, expect to link between the attendees at these bodies and the IETF.

 

The aim of this project is to emphasise the convergence of the ITU-T and IETF approaches. For this reason, we will link also with the ACTS projects in this area. The procedures used over the DBS satellite are fundamentally the DVB procedures; for this reason there is a close involvement already with some aspects of the DAVIC standards. We expect positive stimulation to all parties from the fact that this activity is involved with this rich range of standardisation bodies.

 

During the first year, the main concern will be to ensure that the architecture chosen, and the implementation phases to be adopted, are aligned to the emerging standards. This activity will be partially to track, evaluate and apply the relevant standards; during this year it will also involve influencing the standards to be compliant to the distributed architectures, multicast facilities, and QoS services, that are required.

      1. AC 3110 - Platform architecture

 

Starting event

 

 

Deliverables

 

 

Description

 

This activity is devoted to the definition of the platform that will be used to validate the developments undertaken within the project.

 

Objectives

 

The goal of this activity is to define a platform as representative as possible of a GII architecture. The platform will be based on the equipment and applications at the partners’ premises interconnected trough a WAN infrastructure based on ATM and satellite links.

 

Technical Approach

 

The first step will be to identify the partners resources that can be used to demonstrate through validation scenarios that the requirements listed in WP2100 are fulfilled on the platform.

 

So, this report issued during this activity will give a precise description of the WAN links used to interconnect local Intranet networks that will also be individually detailed. End systems (workstations, PCs, servers) and routers will be identified as well as software configurations running on each end system (operating system, communication protocol software, applications).

 

As the COIAS platform includes a large set elements, the document will also detail the different steps necessary for software delivery and platform integration.

      1. AC 3120 - Validation strategy definition

 

Starting event

 

 

Deliverables

 

 

Description

 

We will define the strategy to be used to validate the advantages of this application to the emerging communications infrastructure, and the way the individual components can be tested.

 

Objectives

 

The objective of this activity is to specify the strategy for assessing the suitability of the COIAS architecture for the applications foreseen.

 

Technical Approach

 

For each application portion, we will generate a set of realistic scenarios. The applications partners will provide detailed information on the data, and much of this will be stored on the media servers with instructions on how it is to be invoked.

 

From D1, we will have a clear indication of the user applications requirements; from D2 we will understand the network services that can be provided. In activities 2210 – 2260, we are providing the intermediate architecture specifications of the different components. In this activity, we will link closely with the other activities in WP2200, to understand the approximate architecture that will be provided in COIAS; this includes what network connections should be provided, and the hardware and software configurations that will be employed. These will be used to define the component tests that must be performed, and the testing components needed to achieve the validation. The validation tests may have implications on the components that need to be provided; for instance distributed timing may require the provision of appropriate timing facilities by incorporating GPS-based clocks at each participating site. The early work will include an assessment of the measuring facilities available; this will include an analysis of the measurement tools provided for both NICE and MECCANO network measurements. We will also investigate whether the NetMetrix monitoring facilities will help for these applications; it is already deployed with some of the partners.

 

Once the mechanisms for measurement and monitoring have been defined, we will identify the different elements of the infrastructure and the application systems that need to be monitored. We will describe the test scenarios, the parameters that must be measured, and how the tools can be synchronised using the timing components deployed. It will also be necessary to make a detailed costing of the facilities that would need to be developed, the equipment and human resources required, and the time needed to put together the facilities. Finally, we must assess whether the resources needed are available to the project.

      1. AC 3210 - Protocol stack development

Starting event

 

 

Deliverables

 

 

Description

 

This activity includes all the necessary software developments to be implemented in an host and corresponding to the WP2200 identified functions.

 

Objectives

 

The goal of this activity is to develop, assembly, integrate and test the different software pieces to be implemented in a GII terminal (IPv6 layer, IPv6 over ATM and satellite link, IntServ, RSVP , QoS management, IPv6 mobility, TCP layer, RM transport layer).

 

Technical Approach

 

The process will follow this path:

 

 

      1. AC 3220 - Security software development

 

Starting event

 

 

Deliverables

 

 

Description

 

In this activity we will develop the security modules which are necessary to build the security infrastructure according to the required functions specified in WP 2200.

 

Objectives

 

The objective of this activity is to implement a security infrastructure in order to provide authentication, confidentiality and integrity services at different levels for the COIAS trials.

 

Technical Approach

 

The deliverable of this activity will contain software modules in order to provide security on the network and application layer. It should be possible to use existing products for key generation and certification. We assume that we can derive the servers for key distribution issues from an available solution. However, we have to carry out some modifications according to meet the requirements specified in WP2200.

 

To provide host security it is necessary to define an interface between existing IPv6 ESP and AH implementations and the CPKI represented by the DNSE. The implementation of the protocols should be based on ISAKMP v6 and ISAKMP-Oakley v2 (depending on the availability of those implementations). By means of this module, it will be possible to provide security (host to host authentication, confidentiality and integrity) at the network layer.

 

But this security level is not sufficient for other circumstances. In order to provide security, especially for electronic commerce applications there is a strong requirement for user authentication within the COIAS platform. For that reason it is necessary to develop an interface at the application layer to the CPKI. According to the policies specified in WP2200 this activity will describe detailed components of the whole infrastructure itself, e.g. certification and registration authority, which provides the key, certificate generation and their distribution. Additionally support of SmartCard or SPSE must be integrated to ensure proper authentication of individuals.

      1. AC 3230 - Media servers development

 

Starting event

 

 

Deliverables

 

 

Description

 

This activity will be to develop the multimedia server required for the COIAS trials.

 

Objectives

 

The objectives of this activity are to make available appropriate media servers for the COIAS trials.

 

Technical Approach

 

Clearly the prototype must meet the specifications of D9 and be compliant with the design of D10. It is expected that the server will be derived from an existing product, though we assume that it will require considerable modification.

 

The Server must provide many functions; some of them are defined below:

 

 

Many of the functions will be achievable with a centralised server; indeed at least one centralised server will be required. In addition, some of the media serving may be best done in a distributed fashion – particularly when the interconnecting data networks cause delays and act as communications barriers. For this reason, part of the media serving will include a distributed architecture, where a central server controls proxies. Sometimes the data must obey particular protocol conventions; it will be determined in D3 and D9 to what extent these protocols will be embedded in the data, and to what extent the players will need to be designed to obey the relevant protocols.

 

We expect that the distributed nature of the communications architecture will match well the server implementations. The broadcast nature of the satellites transmission can be used to maintain data shadows of media information on a central server. This may allow the data itself to be independent of the protocols, but to develop players which are distributed, and perform the correct protocols.

 

      1. AC 3240 - Multimedia Application adaptations

 

Starting event

 

 

Deliverables

 

 

Description

 

This deliverable describes the modification to multimedia applications in order to run over COIAS hybrid infrastructure.

 

Objectives

 

The objectives of this activity are to study the impact of using the new generation of Internet protocols on existing applications and to have a representative GII application running over these protocols.

 

Technical Approach

 

The technical approach we propose is to use a third party dynamic web page server (MS Merchant Server, PageBlazer are possibilities) rather than perlscripted CGI (too restrictive) and embed video content and videostreaming ourselves via server side controls (with appropriate adaptability).

 

Application layer adaptation to the base server can be handled by ISAPI extensions (in-proc dlls). Network layer adaptation can also be initiated by our dlls but will require a Winsock API for IPv6.

 

End to end error and congestion control is important feature in a heterogeneous environment. We will study the mechanisms that should be added to the application in order to overcome the network heterogeneity in terms of bandwidth, error rates and bidirectionality.

 

      1. AC 3250 - Management software development

 

Starting Event

 

 

Deliverables

 

 

Description

 

In this activity we will implement the specified functionality and the architecture of the network management system coming from WP2200.

 

Objectives

The objectives of this activity are as follows:

 

 

Technical Approach

 

According to studies related to different approaches on the network management made in WP2200 and taking into account that the intermediate deliverable D3 will contain the required information a selection procedure on tools platforms (software, hardware) that will be used on the development of the COIAS network management system will take place at the beginning of this activity. After this procedure we will start implementing the architecture and the Human Computer Interfaces of the network management according to inputs being available from D3 (intermediate).

    1. First Year Activity Description (Form M4C)

 

The different activities that are active during the first project year are described using the same M4C form already used for the WP description.

Forms M4C to be inserted:

1110, 1120,

2110, 2120, 2210, 2220, 2230, 2240, 2250, 2260, 2270, 2310,

3110, 3120, 3210, 3220, 3230, 3240, 3250.

  1. Project Management Structure and Techniques

The project management approach of COIAS is based on organisations and techniques which have been successfully adopted in other international collaboration projects and especially in European ones. Its primary aim is, without being too time and budget consuming, to set up a responsive management structure. In this respect, the COIAS project is broken down into a number of WP and activities. This breakdown helps to structure the project and to support the monitoring of the technical and financial progress. The project management is performed by a structure which includes:

 

Project and WP technical and financial progress are assessed during dedicated meetings which are:

    1. Internal management organisation
      1. Project Manager

The overall project management is performed by P01. Therefore, P01 will appoint a highly skilled engineer as Project Manager to:

 

To minimise any risk during the course of the project, the Project Manager is in charge of setting up a risk management chart at the very beginning of the project.

 

      1. Steering Committee

A Steering Committee is in charge of monitoring the progress of the overall project. It takes all the relevant decisions necessary for the project to reach its objectives. This committee gathers the Project Manager and one delegate for each partner, in charge of representing contractors’ individual interests.

 

These delegates have been nominated by each contracting organisation amongst their senior representatives. In particular, they have been selected for their background in project management and in budget responsibility.

 

The main functions of this committee are to:

 

The Steering Committee gathers on a quarterly basis during a Project Steering Meeting or, if an emergency situation is identified in the course of the project.

 

Project milestones are defined by the Steering Committee to be corner stones for a good project tracking. Completion of these milestones are required and are necessary for the smooth progress of the COIAS project. Therefore any major delay in their completion is considered as not acceptable and shall lead to an emergency situation requiring an extraordinary Project Steering Meeting.

 

      1. Work Package Technical Coordinators

For each WP, the main contributor is made responsible for the activities and for the deliverables of that WP. In this respect a technical co-ordinator must be appointed by the WP leader. This co-ordinator reports on a monthly basis to the Project Manager by referring to dedicated yardsticks initially set with him on the WP to assess the work progress. He is also made responsible for:

 

The responsibility for the different WP has been distributed according to Table 3.

 

WP numbering

Responsible company

1100

P01

2100

P05

2200

P02

2300

P03

3100

P05

3200

P01

3300

P06

3400

P01

Table 3: WP responsibility

    1. Project meetings
      1. Project Steering Meetings
      2. The Steering Committee and WP Technical Coordinators gather on a quarterly basis during a Project Steering Meeting or, if an emergency situation is identified in the course of the project. An intensive use of co-operative work through multimedia applications will be made in order to minimise travel expenses.

         

        Project Steering Meetings rotate among partners. The kick-off meeting will take place at the P01 premises.

         

        Project Steering Meetings are mandatory for all delegates of the Steering Committee. To minimise project expenditure, WP Technical Coordinators attend to these meetings only when relevant (in other words if the WP of a co-ordinator is examined during the meeting).

         

        During these meetings, strategic aspects of the project are reviewed, global status of the project is assessed and any relevant decisions are taken.

         

        These actions are carried according to an agenda released 2 weeks in advance by the Project Manager in order for the participants to prepare any necessary material.

         

        Decision making in the course of the project and especially during these Project Steering Meetings takes place on the basis of unanimous agreement. In the event that an unanimous decision cannot be reached in a reasonable time, the Steering Committee shall use a voting mechanism where each company represents the same voting weight (one voice).

         

        In the case where an equally balanced situation is reached in such a voting ballot, the Project Manager has the ability to decide and impose (according to his best understanding of the situation) his opinion for the correct follow-on of the project.

         

      3. Technical Interchange Meetings
      4. Technical Interchange Meetings may take place between partners’ experts in order to analyse and discuss specific technical points.

         

        These workshops may take place on request of any partner and at any necessary time. However, to avoid issues during subsequent integration phases, a minimum of 2 technical meetings is suggested for each technical WP.

         

        Each Technical Interchange Meeting is devoted to a specific technical issue and, for maximum efficiency, only experts interested in this matter attend to the meeting. These meetings take place within the most suitable partner facility.

         

      5. Project Reviews

Project Reviews take place every year with representatives of the ACTS program. These reviews gather the Project Steering Committee, the ACTS Project Officer and ACTS Project Reviewers.

 

The aim of these reviews are for ACTS representatives to verify the correct progress of the COIAS project:

 

To help the ACTS representatives in their evaluation, two types of reports are issued to the commission by the Project Manager:

 

The Management Control Reports and the Progress Reports which are communicated to the commission are considered as confidential and, must be used by EC experts only for establishing their Project Reviews.

 

    1. Internal information flow
    2. The minutes of the different meetings (Project Steering Meeting, Technical Interchange Meetings, Reviews) will be promptly distributed to all partners using electronic mail.

       

      A Web server will be available to ease the information flow among the partners. This server will be used as a central point for information exchange between the partners, between the partners and the EEC and with external organisations. Access to the server will be controlled according to the documents confidentiality.

       

      The server will also be used as a project library where relevant marketing and technical information will be available.

       

      Common software tools will be used for information exchange: the version of Microsoft Office package available at the beginning of the project, MS Project as project management tool. A standard form for meeting minutes and reports will be proposed by the Project Manager at the very beginning of the project.

       

    3. Management of relations with other projects
    4. The management of relations between COIAS and other projects is directly placed under the responsibility of the Project Manager. He will issue at the very beginning of the project the D1 deliverable that describes the area of co-operation with other projects, the expected benefits as well as the impacts in terms of results, schedule and costs. Particular attention will be paid to projects selected in the AC126 and AC419 ACTS third call tasks since their goals seem to be very complementary to the AC321 ones.

       

      The status of the relations with other projects will be summarised in a section of the Management Control Report. It will be detail in the Progress Report.

       

    5. Milestones
    6. Three milestones have been identified (cf. Table 4).

       

      Milestone Identification

      Milestone date

      (Project Year/Month)

      Events

      Expected results

      M1

      01/10

      Availability of intermediate results of WP2200: D3

      End of WP 3100 and availability of D4, D5 and D6

      First specifications of the R&D task and platform definition

      M2

      02/08

      End of WP 3200 and availability of D10 to D16

      End of software development

      F

      02/12

      End of the project and availability of D20, D21 and D22

      Successful end of the trials

      Table 4: COIAS project milestones

      The milestone M1 has been put in place in order to ease the first year review since the expected results can be easily measured and the availability of the milestone deliverables are necessary to guarantee an optimal project follow-up.

       

    7. Consortium agreement

A consortium agreement will be negotiated between the partners at the very beginning of the project. This agreement will define a common position as regards:

 

      1. Preliminary rules of access to Background and Foreground material
      2. Before writing this agreement, preliminary rules of access to Background and Foreground material can already be defined.

         

        For the project purpose, some Background material is actually brought into the project by some partners. On the other hand, Foreground material is developed by the consortium in the course of the project.

         

        For the duration of the project, members of the consortium which are providers of Background material will grant free access to this Background. However, a written consent between concerned partners (the partner providing the Background material and the partner using this same material) shall be released to describe conditions of utilisation of the identified material.

         

        Beyond the project, access to Background and Foreground material is granted to requesting members of the consortium at "fair and reasonable conditions". These conditions will be defined in the Consortium Agreement.

         

      3. Preliminary list of Background material

In preparation of the Consortium Agreement document, the Background of each partner of the consortium has been examined during the set up of the COIAS project.

 

 

Most of these components run under both Solaris and Windows’95/NT; they can be ported to other platforms also. It is expected that under TELEMATOCS MECCANO and ICE-CAR projects, other software will be developed in parallel, which it will be possible for P03 to bring into the COIAS project.

For example, under the ICE-CAR project, P03 will be operating a Certification Hierarchy, based on currently available software, which can be used by the COIAS trials. From National projects and HIPPARCH, P03 expects to develop modules that will provide Quality of Service consistent with IPv6.

 

 

    1. Contract management
    2. This section clarifies the participation of the Sponsoring partners.

       

      1. Role of SP01
      2. SP01 is a European satellite provider for which INTERNET services are a major opportunity to increase the traffic over its network. Its business cases show that these services will boom in the next two years with the availability of low-cost receiving equipment. In that way, the COIAS project appears as an ideal project to experiment new multimedia applications based on new INTERNET protocols able to provide efficient network services.

         

        SP01 therefore brings its strong support to the project by putting its infrastructure at the program disposal. A reasonable number of communication hours will be offered for trial purposes. The additional hours will charged to the project at a reasonable price. PC boards (around 15) including a satellite receiving interface will also be furnished to the project partners. This commitment shows that P01 expects a direct benefit from the R & D effort undertaken within the project. SP01 will not request any funding from the EC for its participation in the COIAS project.

         

      3. Role of SP02

SP02 is an American leader in the field of INTERNET routers and is of course deeply involved in the INTERNET protocol standardization and in the development of routers software that will be compliant with the next generation of INTERNET protocols. SP02 has already developed a first version of IPv6 router software and is very interested to test its implementation in front of different IPv6 end system implementations (provided by P01, P02 and P03) through the COIAS platform. The COIAS project schedule is totally in accordance with P03 development roadmap.

 

SP02 will provide its IPv6 code free of charge to the COIAS partners. This software will be installed on hardware available at the partners premises. SP02 will also provide local support for free both in the development and platform integration phases. SP02 will not request any funding from the EC for its participation in the COIAS project.

  1. Exploitation Plans
  2. Thanks to the advanced INTERNET technologies to be developed in the COIAS market opens a brand new field of applications over ATM and satellite network architectures activities in the field of multimedia applications. It must be pointed out that the development effort relies on previous R&D initiatives heavily sponsored by the EC.

    The COIAS project relies on a very well balanced partnership and is representative of the new levels of cooperations that will be necessary to offer commercial applications in the next couple of years. The COIAS partners are indeed convinced that the cooperation implied by the proposed development will have a very positive long-term effect beside short-term results.

     

    Exploitation plans embodied by contacting partners that plan to reuse the COIAS technology to leverage their industrial strategy are presented in the following sections.

     

    1. Partner P01

For P01, results of the COIAS project will be straightforwardly exploited at different commercial levels which are listed hereafter:

 

For the past two years, P01 has been developing its own "INTERNET new generation" protocol stack. This stack includes IP, TCP, UDP for Local Area Network technologies as well as RSVP and RTP. To pay back this R&D activity, P01 plans to operationally implement its INTERNET NG technology in various kinds of equipment. For this matter, P01 has set-up a partnership policy with computer, workstation, router manufacturers or ATM switches. A first agreement has been reached with BULL which will implement an INTERNET NG stack on UNIX workstations. P01 is a corporate partner of Fore Systems, the ATM world wide leader.

Adapting this kind of protocols for satellite networks is therefore perceived as a great opportunity to extend the potential market for the technology developed by the company: owing to the COIAS project, manufacturers of satellite equipment will clearly be included in the list of potential INTERNET NG customers. More, advanced functions for mobility and security management bring some very interesting additional features in terms of market evolution especially in the fields of electronic commerce and mobile systems.

In this commercial prospect, it must be outlined that the schedule of the COIAS project is very interesting as the protocol development phase copes with the IETF standardisation process. It will be possible for P01 to be one of the first companies to improve its products thanks to the results of the COIAS project. This aggressive schedule turns the COIAS technology into a very attractive product thus justifying the investment in the project. Indeed, the company strongly believes that this technology will be purchased as soon as available by ten different identified prospects involved in the INTERNET business.

 

With its main subsidiary, P01 is currently developing a new generation of high performance set-top boxes. This kind of equipment includes a digital TV interface suited for satellite or for cable distribution networks and, provides advanced services to end users. Among these services, the fast INTERNET access is one of the most attractive. Thanks to the COIAS project, it will be possible to implement INTERNET NG layers adapted to satellite networks within the commercial set-top boxes developed and retailed by P01's subsidiary. That would give a strategic advantage to P01's subsidiary which manufactures about 1 millions of first generation analog set-top boxes for the 96-97 period (for its domestic market but also for export markets such as the Russian one). The production of new generation digital set top boxes, now being developed, will begin in 98.

Other markets suited for the INTERNET NG product are also targeted by the company. P01 plans to develop satellite terminals for on-board applications. This kind of products will extend the activity of the company which a world wide leader of on-board aeronautical systems providing communication services like phone to the passengers. The development of INTERNET terminals can be considered as a promising market. Satellite links will also be used for airplane communications in order to extend the capabilities of flight management by exchanging information between aircraft.

 

P01 is already providing Information Systems for various kinds of applications: Defence, Healthcare, Police department, ... More and more, that kind of systems are based upon standard communication protocols and especially on the fashionable INTERNET stack. Satellite communications can bring cost effective and efficient solutions. Managing the implementation of the protocols upon satellite links will extend the capabilities of the company to satisfy its customer needs.

Because of the historical activities of P01, the company has decided to address high added value Information Systems. These are characterised by a need for high quality multimedia transfers, by a need for secure transfers, and by complex architectures based on heterogeneous platforms and heterogeneous network technologies.

In this prospect, mastering communication technologies is of key importance for the company which must be able to address the most complex request from its customer basis. Therefore, results of the COIAS project ideally complements these self-funded activities. They will leverage P01 strategy by enabling the company to provide more efficient and attractive communication solutions for the Information Systems of its customers.

    1. Partner P04

 

For P04, the results of the COIAS project will reuse the COIAS technology in the following areas of information security:

 

P04 is already providing vendors of information systems and their customers with common and individual solutions to enhance the security for various kinds of applications. Apart from the need of authentication of the principals, there is a strong need for secure communications especially in the fields of electronic commerce, virtual private networks and office communication systems. The most common solutions for this field of applications are based upon standard communication protocols, e.g. the Internet protocol stack. Within the COIAS project the teams intend to work in close relationship with the according IETF working groups to participate in the standardisation process, this will promote the P04 strategy by enabling the company to provide attractive security solutions for the next generation of the famous Internet stack. P04 will in invest in this technological approach, because we believe that the IPng approach reflects a broad range of requirements that are missing in current applications. Through these investments it will be possible for P04 to play a leading role in providing security solutions based upon and within the next protocol generation to satisfy our customer’s needs in the near future.

 

P04 also offers a comprehensive set of services and certified equipment for trusted third party service providers and certification authorities. To support the flow back of R&D investments P04 is going to set-up partnership agreements with major network providers and IT enterprises to carry out fundamental components for a required security infrastructure to accompany the information age. Through the COIAS project it will be possible for P04 to implement security enhancements for IPng with support of satellite based communication applications and mobility aspects. The participation in the COIAS project will force the development of enhanced security solutions for inter-domain authentication purposes in all fields of Internet business. We believe that the sponsorship of COIAS technology will accelerate the development of an European information and telecommunication market, because the COIAS technology contains features, which where missed in the current dominate technology. The lack of standardised e.g. security functionality is one of the major reasons of the unsatisfactory development of electronic business. The results of the COIAS project will complement our activities and support the company to provide common and standardised security solutions for our customers.

    1. Partner P05
    2.  

      P05 is a major European telecommunication player who has invested a lot during the recent past years in the Internet and ATM fields.

       

      To cope with the dramatic Internet growth, a subsidiary of P05 became the world's first high-speed, high-reliability provider of a global Internet 'backbone' network. It offers the world's largest Internet network. Increasing the capacity of the Internet by 30%, the network will be based on an eventual 20 telecoms 'superhubs' linked by fibre optic cabling.

       

      Through world-wide partnerships, P05 plans to be an Internet market leader in the US and Europe. Market studies at P05 are as follows: « Services via the Internet already include phone calls and videoconferencing - an emerging and potentially fast growing technology - and a currently tiny but growing retailing operation. As secure electronic cash transactions become more widely trusted, this sector is likely to grow fast. Business and retail transactions will reach $21 billion by 2000 ».

       

      To support this growth, the need for a faster technology for multimedia is obvious. The ATM will colonise growing part of the data networking equipment market in recent years. ATM is expected to penetrate further as its price continues to fall.

       

      For all these reasons, P05 is very interesting in the COIAS project results that could be reused in P05 business.

    3. Partner P06

 

P06 is already providing connectivity services to various kinds of businesses. One of the services is Internet. P06 is planning to offer these services to isolated regions (islands). Through COIAS it will be feasible to evaluate (in terms of cost, QoS) the use of satellites and Internet new generation technologies. This will offer the opportunity to P06 to offer advanced Internet services, by extending its backbone network, to isolated regions that could be used for educational medical and business purposes.

 

P06 designs and develops management systems based on commercial platforms for networks installed in various businesses. Most of these systems are designed for terrestrial networks. Among customers of P06 are bank organisations that plan to introduce satellite usage to connect domestic and abroad branches. By investing in the COIAS project P06 aims at developing an integrated network management system that could be purchased from large organisations acting in the banking sector and additionally could be used when the extension of P06’s backbone network (i.e. including satellite links) will take place. This extension is estimated to happen around 2000.

 

  1. List of acronyms

 

ABR Available Bit Rate

ACTS Advanced Communications Technologies and Services

ADSL Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line

ISP Internet Service Provider

AH Authentication Header

API Application Programming Interface

ATM Asynchronous Transfer Mode

B-ISDN Broadband Integrated Services Data Network

CA Certification Authority

CAIRN Collaborative Advanced Inter-agency Research Network

CBR Constant Bit Rate

CPKI COIAS Public Key Infrastructure

DAVIC Digital Audio Visual Council

DNS Domain Name Service

DNSE DNS Enhancements

DTH Direct To Home

DVB Digital Video Broadcasting

DVB-S DVB System

EC European Commission

ECU European Currency Unit

ESP Encapsulating Security Payload

ETSI European Telecommunications Standards Institute

FEC Forward Error Correction

GEO Geo-stationary Earth Orbit

GII Global Internet Infrastructure

GPS Global Positioning System

GSM Global System for Mobile communications

GUI Graphical User Interface

HIPERLAN High Performance Radio LAN

IAP Internet Access Provider

IEEE Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers

IETF Internet Engineering Task Force

IntServ Integrated Services

IP Internet Protocol

IPng Internet Protocol new generation

IPSEC IP security protocol

IRTF Internet Research Task Force

ISAKMP Internet Security Association Key Management Protocol

ISAPI (Microsoft) Information Server API

ISDN Integrated Services Digital Network

ISP Internet Service Provider

ISSLL Integrated Services over Specific Link Layers

ITU International Telecommunication Union

JAMES Joined ATM experiment on European Services

JMAPI Java Management API

Kbps Kilo bits per second

LAN Local Area Network

MARS Multicast Address Resolution Server

MBONE Multicast (Internet) Backbone

Mbps Mega bits per second

MIB Management Information Base

MMUSIC Multiparty Multimedia Session Control

PC Personal Computer

PCR Peak Cell Rate

POP Point Of Presence

PSTN Public Switched Telecommunications Network

PVC Permanent Virtual Circuits

QoS Quality of Service

RA Registration Authority

R&D Research and Development

RENATER Réseau National des Télécommunications pour l’Enseignement et la Recherche

RFC Request For Comments

RM Reliable Multicast

RSVP Resource reServation Protocol

RTP Real Time Protocol

RTSP Real Time Streaming Protocol

SA Security Association

SCPC Single Channel Per Carrier

SCR Sustainable Cell Rate

SSL Secure Socket Layer

SME Small or Medium Entreprise

SMS Satellite Multiservices System

SNMP Simple Network Management Protocol

SPSE Software Personal Security Environments

SVC Switched Virtual Circuits

TCP Transmission Control Protocol

TVRO Television Receiver Only

TTP Trusted Third Party

UDP User Datagram Protocol

VBR Variable Bit Rate

VC Virtual Channel

VoD Video on Demand

VP Virtual Path

VPC Virtual Path Connection

WAN Wide Area Network

WP Work Package

WPG Work Package Group

WWW World Wide Web

 

 

Proposal Number: 30160

Programme: ACTS

 

Project Title:

COnvergence
Internet-ATM-Satellite

(COIAS)

 

 

Section 3 - Participant’s Roles and Qualifications

 

 

Date of Preparation: 26 September 1997