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February 10, 2004

Flow-Based Routing Breakthrough Demonstrated by NTT Laboratories, University of Tokyo and University of Illinois

MaXimal Queuing (MXQ) highlighted as improvement to IP/MPLS QoS in ON*VECTOR workshop in Chicago

CHICAGO, IL - NTT Network Innovation Laboratories, a research division of Nippon Telephone & Telegraph (NTT), University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and University of Tokyo, today demonstrated innovative new IP network congestion control capabilities based on the latest generation flow-based routing technology.

In a workshop hosted by the UIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL), NTT showed its MaXimal Queuing (MXQ) algorithm to leading network academics, and demonstrated its effectiveness at preventing congestion in highly-utilized networks.

EVL’s TeraVision was used to send three high-resolution video streams to a super-high-definition tiled display, while an Access Grid distributed video conferencing system also ran over the MXQ-enabled network. Attendees, some of whom participated via the Access Grid, were shown the signal degradation inherent in times of network congestion using conventional IP/MPLS routers, then the elimination of this congestion with new flow-based Caspian Apeiro routers incorporating the MXQ algorithm.

In flow-based networking, packets are routed as whole flows, i.e., streams of related packets, rather than as individual packets as in current IP/MPLS networks. The unique level of data obtained in flow-based routing, such as flow length, rate, delay variation and other parameters, enable a number of new network benefits.

“MXQ flow-based control mechanism arbitrates flows based on their sending rate,” said Dr. Takashi Shimizu of NTT Laboratories. “When congestion occurs, MXQ helps routers intelligently discard or, where possible, delay packets from higher rate flows, allowing the protection of smaller-rate flows and improved utilization of the network. This sort of congestion control intelligence is only possible in a flow-based environment, where routers know which packets belong to which flow.”

“MXQ’s arbitration of flows according to their sending rate was achieved under realistic conditions using a combination of TeraVision streams to a 30-megapixel GeoWall-2 tiled LCD display, and Access Grid video conferencing,” said Professor Jason Leigh, of EVL. “Caspian’s MXQ implementation worked very well, even under real-world traffic.”

Today’s demonstrations were part of the ON*VECTOR Advanced Networking Workshop hosted at UIC / EVL, which focused on new flow-based networking techniques to improve QoS and enable better service models for IP-based telecommunications. They were the result of ongoing collaboration among NTT Labs, UIC / EVL and University of Tokyo.

Four months of testbed experiments conducted with the cooperation and technical support of Caspian Networks and NTT Communications allowed researchers to gather experimental data on flow-based networking using the high-performance computational, networking and visualization infrastructure developed at EVL.

Additional demonstrations by the University of Tokyo and Caspian Networks further illustrated the benefits of flow-based networking, including peer-to-peer traffic identification and control, as well as denial-of-service (DoS) prevention.

Workshop participants included attendees from UIC, NTTs, University of Tokyo, Caspian Networks, Northwestern University and Argonne National Laboratory.

About University of Illinois at Chicago’s EVL
The Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago is an interdisciplinary graduate student research laboratory that combines art and computer science, and specializes in virtual reality, visualization and high-speed networking. The laboratory is a joint effort of UIC’s College of Engineering and School of Art & Design, and represents the oldest formal collaboration between engineering and art in the country offering graduate degrees in visualization. Funded research projects include tele-immersion, amplified collaboration environments, the development of viable, scalable, deployable stereo displays, and management of next-generation advanced networking initiatives. Contact: Laura Wolf (laura @ evl.uic.edu).

About NTT Network Innovations Laboratories
NTT Network Innovation Laboratories in Yokosuka, Japan, is affiliated with the NTT Science and Core Technology Laboratory Group, one of NTT’s three laboratory groups, and was established in 1999 to bring together a wide range of optics, wireless systems, network software and imaging researchers, and to cover all aspects of networking from the physical layer to the application layer.

About Aoyama Morikawa Lab at the University of Tokyo
The Aoyama Morikawa Lab (AML) at the University of Tokyo is a research group in the Department of Information and Communication Engineering and the Department of Frontier Informatics. AML researchers study systems and strategy issues related to next generation Internet, ubiquitous network / computing, mobile computing / Internet, distributed computing, photonic Internet, and P2P networking. AML’s research goal is to define network architectures, protocols, applications, and systems for future information utility for all levels of network design, ranging from photonic Internet to network-oriented applications and services. Contact: Professor Hiroyuki Morikawa (mori @ mlab.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp).

About Caspian Networks
Caspian Networks is an innovative Internet infrastructure company with a new generation of equipment for the heart of service provider networks. The company’s mission is to lead in high performance networking systems that revolutionize economics for network service providers. Caspian was founded by Internet pioneer Dr. Lawrence Roberts. The company is based in San Jose, California with offices in Minnesota, North Carolina, the United Kingdom, Japan and China. Contact: Dallas Kachan, Director of Marketing, Caspian Networks, Inc., 408-353-9509, (dzk @ caspian.com).