1. INTRODUCTION

 

According to its contract, the HICID project started on October 1, 1997. However, the contracts were only received at UCL in early January 1998, and were signed January 13, 1998. The budget for HICID envisages only 10 mm, and much of it is designated to undertake QoS experiments with running multimedia sessions carried out under the HIGHVIEW and JAVIC projects. In addition we intend to carry out many of the experimental activities using LEARNET and MECCANO - as mentioned in the original proposal.

 

In practice there have been several delays in the accompanying projects. MECCANO was delayed by EU bureaucracy; it is now starting April 1, 1998. LEARNET has been delayed by problems in accessing the BT tower termination; the UCL connection is now not expected to be complete before April 1998. JAVIC does not expect to do any on-line WAN sessions before 1999. HIGHVIEW has been doing a number of trials over SuperJanet, so we could have been instrumenting the network performance at the same time. In addition to the above, the CAIRN routers were undergoing substantial upgrades during the last quarter of 1997. Finally, Jon Crowcroft has been on Sabbatical since January.

 

In view of the above, we used the contractual excuse of the official signing of the contract being early January 1998 to delay the practical start of the project until that date. Since it also took time to release people to work on the project, the effective starting date was February 1, 1998. This allows us to carry out the requisite support experiments with JAVIC and HICID until the middle of 1999 - using the workplan outlined in the proposal. In the circumstances, we have decided not to do serious testing of our QoS tools before August 1998.

 

2. The Proposed Work-Plan

 

The work plan envisaged that many of the basic router configurations would be set up under the DARPA and MECCANO projects. The former has been proceeding, the latter has been delayed as stated.

 

I repeat below the progress originally promised:

 

 

 

 

NO	ACTIVITY	COMPLETED Month
1	Set up workstations, conference rooms, networks, basic routers	4
2	Set up gateways, measurement facilities, servers, routers with PIM and with DVRMP	2
3	Do test experiments with PIM and DVMRP; set up RSVP, CBT and WFQ and RED	3
4	Do test experiments with WFQ + RSVP, CBT and RSVP, WFQ + RED	6
5	Do application level experiments and pilot trials on MECCANO, HIGHVIEW and JAVIC tools with different Servers with single streams	9
6	Extend test and application trials to use the later versions of the above tools, with improved QoS reservations.	15

 

Based on a start date of February 1, 1998; we are keeping up with this schedule.

 

3. Progress to Date

 

We did not anticipate, at the time we wrote the HICID proposal that UKERNA would ask UCL to provide better multimedia services for a small-scale pilot.

 

We have not yet set up any workstations (PCs), but we have the expertise to do it when needed for the following components:

 

Protocol	Software Implementation
DVMRP	(mrouted)
RSVP
WFQ, CBQ, RED	(altq-0.4 version)

It is not yet clear how well the RSVP interoperates with mrouted. The person working on HICID does not yet have experience with the following::PIM (pimd from ISI) or CBT, This will change as soon as Jon Crowcroft returns from his Sabathical, in April.

 

Measurement Facilities	Status:
HP Probes sily	can be set up in UCL when needed reasonably easily
tcpdump
ttt	tele-traffic-tapper is a program from Kenjiro Cho (altq), for traffic visualisation, which we are building up..

 

 

Moreover we now know what each one of the above is doing.

 

So far we have done no tests with any other site outside UCL, though we expect to change this over the next quarter.

 

4. Plans for Next Quarter

During the next quarter, we expect to complete the connection to LEARNET at UCL. This will allow us to put CAIRN routers at Essex U and UCL, and enable the implementation of QoS between the two sites. Because of the way that HighView has Server-based traffic generation, we should be able put up enough traffic to require the QoS trafffic facilities. We will investigate which of the protocols of Section would be the easiest to put up first, and should have real experimental results by the end of the quarter.