Based on the emerging needs of research and education, networking leaders have worked together in the past few years to develop a shared vision of next-generation networking technologies. This vision includes new hybrid optical and packet networking capabilities, which are required to enable the next decade of innovative applications. Spurred by an impending deadline to either continue the existing Internet2 Abilene Network past September 2007 or develop a new network, in January of 2006 Internet2 began to examine possibilities held by a new network. In March, Internet2 declined an option to extend the Abilene agreement with Qwest Communications.
To develop the new network plan that realized the community's vision for a hybrid optical and packet infrastructure, Internet2 staff first conducted months of collaboration and discussion with network engineers within the research and education communities as well as industry experts. In June 2006, Internet2 hosted a Community Design Workshop to present and receive feedback on the proposed architecture of the future Internet2 Network. Internet2 announced partnerships with Level 3 Communications, Infinera, and Ciena to implement the network. This new infrastructure is designed to provide next-generation production services enabling a wide variety of bandwidth-intensive applications in use and under development at campuses and research labs. In parallel, the new infrastructure enables breakable testbeds that support network research, including the development of new networking tools and protocols.
The new Internet2 Network is being deployed nationwide over more than 13,000 miles of dedicated fiber, providing complete community control of the optical layer. The network's optical technology will provide extremely flexible dedicated circuit services that can be provisioned dynamically. The network will provide short-term and long-term waves, and, eventually, on-demand or advance reservation dedicated circuit scheduling. The IP service, corresponding to the previous Abilene Network and utilizing the existing Juniper T640 routers, is being built on the optical network infrastructure. As with the current backbone, the IP services will provide IPv6 connectivity to its members with performance identical to that provided for IPv4, supporting global addressability for very large numbers of nodes that may be needed for large sensor networks or similar applications. It will also provide scalable multicast.