[IP] an old doc of mine that I found dated 2/17/96 -- A Vision for Penn 2000 in Computer/Communications
A Vision for Penn 2000 in Computer/Communications
David Farber
The Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Telecommunication Systems
University of Pennsylvania
2/17/96
I would like to propose a vision of what computing and
communications on the Penn campus can and should look like in the
year 2000 – in the world of the Global Information Infrastructure
(GII). I will propose a system which supports an improved “way of
life” for the students and staff. Issues will be examined that bear
on teaching, safety, education and living. Each technology will
support improvement in one of these areas.
A Scenario for Education in the early 21 St. Century
The dawn of the Global Information Infrastructure - the GII, offers
a set of challenges for governmental, industrial and education
organizations. The ability to extend their operation past their
national boundaries offers both problems and opportunities for these
organizations. The governments can provide the international
atmosphere and resources required to bootstrap the GII by expressing
their visions. To avoid an abundance of technical pitfalls, it is
important to stress the fact that the development of the GII should
be application driven, NOT technology driven. The potential technical
solutions are there, but must be selected according to their usefulness.
Nowhere are the challenges greater than in the possibilities that the
GII offers in education. There is no better way to create
international understanding, friendship and exchange than
communication and cooperation between schools and students all over
the world at all levels. Education applications cover most potential
uses of the GII and impose demanding requirements on the
infrastructure. Education is also an area where the public interest
is evident.
The role of the universities in educating the citizens who will lead
their nations into this future calls upon them to pioneer the
exploration of the benefits to be gained as well as the problems to
be faced in this new world. Exploration of the Modern Worldwide Multi-
Campus University - University of Cyberspace - interacting with lower
grade schools and continuing education to provide individual-centered
lifelong learning, should therefore be included in the our vision.
The intent should be not to just perform experiments with exchange of
courses over the network but rather to explore, understand and solve
the complicated issues of inter-organizational operation, economics,
national laws and tradition that must be solved in order to create
such an extended University. Perhaps most important, however, we
must understand how such an organization can enrich University life
for the students as well as the faculty. The design of the University
must address this issue with highest priority if it is to be a success.
We strongly believe that the lessons to be learned from this effort
will show the way for better understanding of how industry and
governments can use the GII. This effort will contribute to new
strategic knowledge necessary to cope with the global structural
change of the telecommunications, media and information industries
which is expected to lead to an information society. This rapid
change calls for extraordinary programs in research and education to
provide the competence necessary in government, industry, among users
and all parts of society. However, the most important outcome will be
to create a new generation of future leaders who have lived and
learned in the borderless world of the GII and who thus will be
better prepared to understand and control the structural changes
being created by the information society in order to secure fuller
more meaningful employment and social welfare for their people.
TECHNICAL VISIONS
Information technology will continue to develop extremely fast. The
life-time of any particular technology is hard to predict but is in
general decreasing. It is therefore important to focus on invariable
requirements and be open to new technologies implementing them. The
increasing demands for broadband mobile access to high-performance
communication, computing and information services seem to constitute
such requirements.
A reasonable technical vision for the GII for the first decade of the
21st century would be that
· Walls become interactive and connected (at 1-10 Gbit/s) to a
global high-performance infrastructure.
· Personal C&C systems are integrated in multimodal wearables,
including goggles, augmenting reality by overlaying information and
providing a billion users with mobile wireless access (at 10-155 Mbit/
s) to a high-performance infrastructure.
· Personal software assistants help manage information, provide
decision support, etc
· The High-Performance Infrastructure will include high-
performance computing and server facilities and support mobile
multicast services with dynamic quality of service requirements,
including the necessary real-time properties supporting interactive
distributed applications. Distributed switching of terabit/s of
aggregate data flows from connections with dynamic characteristics
should be supported.
· The cost of personal multimedia communication should be as low
as telephone calls today
It is evident that not many existing, or even emerging, technologies
scale to cope with this vision. GII testbeds should therefore not
prescribe any particular technology but allow for experiments at all
levels. The issues to be explored include:
* What will future telecommunication systems architectures be? The
research community and industry should cooperate in industrial
application projects to extract realistic systems requirements as
input to research programs.
* How will they be realized? This issue requires interdisciplinary
research to study realization schemes with optimal price/performance
ratios, from usage schemes and man-machine interaction, via computing
and communication systems, to photonics and wireless component
technologies.
* How will we transition to these systems and how will these system
interoperate with legacy systems? Again the research community and
industry must interact closely to ensure realistic scaling properties
and design migration strategies.
PROPOSAL FOR AN APPLICATION DRIVEN EVALUATION OF GII TECHNOLOGY AND
ITS IMPACTS
In the spirit of the development outlined above, we propose to create
a “University of Cyberspace” composed of four leading institutions in
Europe and the USA chosen to reflect a diversity of style and focus,
different national traditions in education and a strong internal
understanding of the technology and its potential. We intend that the
“University of Cyberspace” will expand beyond the initial four and
the USA and Europe as we gain a better understanding of what must be
done and what the impacts are of the cultural and legal differences
between the participants.
A first goal is to establish a commonly ackowledged one-year
curriculum on technical, social, legal, administrative and other
aspects of the GII itself. The curriculum spans half a year of
courses and a half-year thesis work and could be used either as part
of a senior undergraduate or a as part of a first year graduate
education. Experiments will be conducted 1995-1996 and formal start
will be January 1 1997. The vision is to allow students and faculty
to communicate and access course material and other information
globally, from the involved campuses, homes and wherever they can get
access to the GII. The communication can be in terms of * seminars,
lectures and recitations with multicast multimedia interaction in
real-time or accessed asynchronously from servers * computer-mediated
conferences * advising via email
These applications will be driving the evaluation of various aspects
of the GII:
· Social and cultural issues related to student life, faculty
career planning, etc
· Administrative, Economical and Legal issues related to faculty
and staff exchange, tuition, student living costs, intelectual
property rights, etc
· Technical aspects: evaluation of candidate communication
system architectures for the GII including protocol hierarchies,
switching and medium-access technologies, such as ATM, SDH/SONET,
DTM, etc. Issues to be evaluated should include cost/performance,
scalability an other key parameters
What will the life of a Penn student be like
Where do they learn
The student of the future at Penn will have a vastly enhanced set of
educational opportunities. Courses and seminars will be attended
often remotely thus providing students with the opportunities of
sitting in on classes taught by the best in the world in the subjects
of interest. For example, first year Physics students will be able to
attend lectures by the Feynman of their day. A student will be able
to attend seminars in Japanese history being held at the University
of Tokyo. All this educational opportunity will be coordinated by the
Penn faculty who can then devote their educational time to
interaction with students, helping small groups of students to
understand what they have heard, teaching their specialties
First an overall image of what I have in mind for Penn. I envision a
campus with communications focused on two key areas. One is person
based and features mobility and the integration of voice and data
into a personal communicator offering voice and data services, for
example two way “paging”, appointment handling, personal security,
access to information like WWW as well as inexpensive voice all
utilizing IP data paths. The other is based on ultra high speed
communications allowing the creation on the campus of a meta-computer
environment allowing the collection of all the computing capabilities
of the campus into a computer power utility from which one can draw
power (machines, storage etc.) as needed and for as long as needed.
A Scenario of a Student’s use
A student is walking around the campus with the UPenn Personal
Assistant (UPA) in hand. The UPA is a device the size of a Sony
MagicLink (~ 4x6 inches) with a flip cover backlite color screen
and a keyboard integrated into the cover plus a pen etc. There is a
combined headset microphone cord plugged into the unit. The student
can make and receive calls via the UPA. The voice is carried over the
same IP radio channel used for data transfers to the UPA. All “phone”
traffic is IP based and thus when the student gets to their dorm
room, they may receive calls via the UPA or their desktop computer in
a seamless manner. The UPA and any workstation so authorized can
function as a “answering machine”.
In addition, the UPA is the student electronic wallet allowing the
student to pay for and receive payment via the UPA utilizing one of
the secure smartcards that will be available.
The speed of the radio link is 128 or 256 kb and is composed of micro-
cells utilizing phase 2 HandyPhone (NTT) or equivalent technology. It
is operated by Penn and thus is de-coupled from the tariffs and
limitations of normal telephone service.
As part of the services offered for the mobile student, a 911
capability is supplied via a “red” button on the UPA. When the 911
button is pushed the student is paced in voice contact with campus
security and the exact location of the UPA (and this the student) is
sent to the security people as determined by the micro-cellular
system. The two way voice allows advise to the student will the
nearest police is vectored to them. Note the location of each police-
person is determined in a similar fashion and thus the campus
computer complex can optimize the dispatching.
Subject to the limitations of the bandwidth (which is reasonably
high) limited video will also be available to the UPA while it is
mobile.
When the student goes to their dorm, classroom or library, the UPA
will plug into the campus network (the structure of that will be
described latter). They will then have access to the campus
metacomputer (see Farber88 et al). The campus metacomputer has been
created by pooling all the workstations etc. of the Penn campus into
a distributed system operating similar to a large multiprocessor
system. When a user is not actively utilizing the processor/memory
of their workstation, that capability is made available to other
users (in a seamless fashion) to allow them to enlarge their
computing power or memory etc. for short or long periods. The owner
of the borrowed workstation is guaranteed to have their computing
capability on demand either by shifting the borrowing program to
another unit or giving the workstation ownder anoither system.
Performance will not be affected.
Thus the UPA owner has the ability either over the wireless links
(with decreased performance ) or over the campus net to have in their
hands a supercomputer if needed. If the student sits down at a
workstation (better graphics etc.), all the information in their UPA
is seamlessly usable from the workstation and and information can be
stored on the UPA for latter use.
As has been suggested above the Penn network will be called upon to
carry not only the normal computer traffic we now see but all the
campus voice and video and the load of the campus metacomputer
traffic. That suggests paths of a minimum of 620 megabit per second
for local distribution within buildings and complexes and much higher
capabilities -- 2.5 gigabit per second and experimentation with all
optical at 9.6 gps per wavelength with 16-32 wavelengths used for
the campus inter-tie (backbone) system. Within the time frame of the
implementation of the new structure, all optical switching may become
practical for use in such an inter-tie network. The exact structure
of the complex and how it handles legacy systems is a matter for
study in the near future.
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