About
National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Role in the Next Generation Internet

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, is participating in the Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative, a multiagency effort that also includes the Departments of Defense, Energy, and Commerce, and the National Science Foundation.

This initiative is important to NASA because NASA missions require the interconnection and integration of its unique resources that include user facilities, databases, and supercomputers, as well as geographically distributed researchers and scientists located at universities, federal research institutions and in industry.

The NASA-funded research and engineering community consists of over 180 universities, 30 industry partners, and 5 science and research centers where NASA has significant research programs in place. The importance to NASA of coupling resources at different sites to solve critical problems is underlined by the research challenges in the fields of advanced aerospace design, Earth sciences, astrobiology, astrophysics, telemedicine and space exploration.

Unfortunately, the current Internet is too unreliable, too primitive, too geographically limited, and has too low a capacity to provide strong support for these requirements. NASA and other agencies have been working on technologies in concert with private industry to improve the Internet. The NGI will address not only accessible but also remote sites and rural states. NASA experiments are anticipated to assist research in reaching beyond the current Internet infrastructure to accelerate technology development and deployment to remote locations. This initiative provides the critical mass and leverage to unite this work and bring it to rapid fruition.

The Next Generation Internet has three goals:

  • Promote experimentation with the next generation of networking technologies.
  • Develop a next generation network testbed to connect universities and Federal research institutions at rates that demonstrate new networking technologies and support future research.
  • Demonstrate new applications that support important national goals and missions such as scientific research, national security, distance education, environmental monitoring and health care.

To achieve these goals, NGI will be built on the base of current R&D activities and programs in the participating Federal agencies. Furthermore, it will call on substantial matching funds from its private sector partners and collaborate with academia.

Goal 1: Technologies

NASA has a significant role in fulfilling this goal of the initiative in partnership with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and other agencies. NASA will deploy an appropriate suite of advanced networking services to enable high performance applications. NASA-sponsored research will focus on important issues such as network performance measurement, network interoperability, quality of service and network security. NASA will fund and manage research in advanced network technologies that are richer in features, higher in performance, and deliverable at a reasonable cost. For example, they will enable real-time networking, group collaborations, remote access to the network, and a seamless interface for space-to-ground communications.

NASA will continue to be an early adopter of emerging networking technologies that chart a course for a robust, scaleable, shared infrastructure supporting lead users from NASA, other government agencies, and the research community, as well as large numbers of ordinary commercial users.

NASA's program goal relevant to NGI's goal 1 is to sponsor R&D in new networking technologies and services in support of the high performance applications requirements. NASA will partner with industry and academia on R&D in internetworking technologies to achieve an interoperable high performance network testbed. By doing so, NASA will deliver advanced networking technologies to the aerospace community and ultimately to the public.

Goal 2: Testbeds

NASA will provide both a high performance network application testbed and a network research testbed for the NASA community and its partners. These testbeds exist at the various NASA centers now and can be interconnected via NREN providing virtual testbeds and harnessing the expertise distributed throughout NASA. NASA will focus on delivering a leading-edge application environment to its community. Therefore, NASA will:

  • Enable next-generation application demonstrations across the network
  • Internetwork with other Federal agencies and academic and industry partners at both the IP and ATM service level
  • Deploy advanced networking services such as IPv6, multicast, QoS, security and network management tools

    • The research effort supports such advanced capabilities as remote interactive graphics, nationwide digital libraries, and network-based high-definition displays for science, manufacturing and education.

    Among the features to be packed into the NGI program will be new switching systems, network protocols, high-speed interconnections to workstations and supercomputers, as well as new forms of interconnection and hybrid networking to reach remote and mobile users. NGI will highly leverage industry developments and any ongoing Federal research to provide a hybrid networking demonstration platform. NASA will leverage its experience in high-speed satellite data communications from the Advanced Communications Technology Satellite program and attempt to make use of existing NASA satellite resources as well as seeking out satellite services from commercial sources. These high-speed links could provide a means of connecting international testbeds to the NGI (e.g., GIBN, the Global Interoperability Broadband Network).

    Managing the dynamics of these activities will be a major challenge, but the payoff for success will be enormous in terms of national capabilities, research productivity, and new commercial products and services.

    Goal 3: Revolutionary Applications

    NASA has already embarked on a number of applications which will require the network technology acceleration of the Next Generation Internet to be successful. Sample revolutionary applications include:

  • Advanced Aerospace Design and Test Tools - NASA wind tunnels on-line, virtual flight simulation laboratories on-line
  • Telemedicine - Interactive consultations, remote protocols and procedures modeling distant health care delivery in space
  • Earth Sciences - Advanced science investigations for Mission to Planet Earth
  • Astrobiology - Remote scientific analysis of Martian rock, virtual aerospace environments for distributed collaborations
  • Astrophysics - Remote operations of space telescopes located in isolated areas such as the Keck Observatory in Hawaii
  • Space Exploration - Remote interactive visualizations for command and control of robotic explorers such as the Mars Pathfinder

    • For more information about NGI, see URL www.ngi.gov

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    Responsible NASA Official:
    Christine Falsetti     		Web Site Curator: NREN Webmaster
    E-Mail: nren@mail.arc.nasa.gov     		Last updated:
    03/14/97