MichNet News
November 1996
New Focus for the Routing Arbiter Project
The National Science Foundation has announced a new direction for the Routing Arbiter (RA) project, a partnership between Merit and the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute. Charged by NSF in 1994 with the task of providing routing coordination in the post-NSFNET environment, the Routing Arbiter has been a key player in the transition from the NSFNET backbone service to the new U.S. network architecture.
The NSF announcement came at the two-year review of the Routing Arbiter project and the four Network Access Points (NAPs), the nationwide locations where Internet Service Providers such as MCI, Sprint, and ANS exchange network traffic. The Routing Arbiter and the NAP projects have both completed their basic missions ahead of schedule, noted the NSF.
George Strawn, networking division director at the NSF, commended the Routing Arbiter for its performance during the past two years, and noted that the Routing Arbiter and the NAPs "have now proven that multiple network providers can work together in a competitive marketplace, and so can be scheduled for transition to commercial operations themselves."
NSFNET program director Mark Luker said that researchers from the RA and the NAPs will now focus on connections and routing for advanced networking, and noted that "both actions help NSF to move to the next stage, a stronger focus on the high-performance Internet of the future needed to support today's advanced research." Merit is now working with NSF to define its refocused RA activities, which will continue for the full five-year project, ending in 1999.
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Merit has played an important role in national networking since 1987, when NSF selected Merit and its partners MCI, IBM, and the State of Michigan to manage and re-engineer the NSFNET backbone service. The NSFNET, a key part of the infrastructure on which the current Internet is built, was decommissioned in April 1995. The new infrastructure is composed of multiple backbones serving hundreds of Internet Service Providers across the U.S. Two of the RA project's major products, the Route Servers and the Routing Arbiter Database, were designed for the new environment. For more information, see "Merit Coordinates U.S. Internet Routing" in the Summer 1995 issue of MichNet News, or visit the Routing Arbiter Web pages at: http://www.ra.net/
--Susan R. Harris, Merit