vBNS: not your father´s Internet

The very-high-performance Backbone Network Service (vBNS) is an important part of ongoing efforts by government, industry, and academia to push the state of the art in Internet technologies and academic research applications. It is dedicated to serving research and education institutions whose scientific endeavors require networking performance not possible or not practical with commercial network services. Currently, the vBNS is implemented as an IP-over-ATM network-that is, its network layer (layer 3 of the open systems interconnection reference model promulgated by the International Organization for Standardization) runs the Internet Protocol on top of the asynchronous transfer mode protocol. Those protocols, in turn, run on a synchronous optical network (Sonet) OC-12-622.08-Mb/s-infrastructure. Though access was originally limited to five supercomputer centers and four network access points, the National Science Foundation´s High-Performance Connections program is now expanding the vBNS to reach over 100 institutions. The vBNS also has connections to other research networks, both within the United States and abroad. Before describing the architecture of the vBNS, the services it provides, and the metrics developed to assess its performance, the article reviews the background against which it came into being. It also briefly discusses how the vBNS relates to the Next Generation Internet (NGI) and Internet2