<NIS.NSF.NET> [IMR] IMR86-09.TXT

SEPTEMBER 1986

INTERNET MONTHLY REPORTS
------------------------

The purpose of these reports is to communicate to the Internet Research
Group the accomplishments, milestones reached, or problems discovered by
the task forces and contractors in the ARPA Internet Research Program.

This report is for research use only, and is not for public
distribution.

Each task force and contractor is expected to submit a 1/2 page report
on the first business day of the month describing the previous month's
activities. These reports should be submitted via ARPANET mail to
Westine@ISI.EDU.

Reports are requested from BBN, LINKABIT, ISI, LL, MIT-LCS, NTA, SRI,
and UCL.

Other groups are invited to report newsworthy events or issues.

BBN LABORATORIES AND BBN COMMUNICATIONS CORPORATION
---------------------------------------------------

SATNET

The SATNET continued to be stable. As before, we are holding off on
correcting channel 1 problems until Linkabit delivers some spare
modems. Since channel 0 performance was fine, the SATNET provided
uninterrupted service.

Last month's release of a new version of the Butterfly gateway
software seems to have greatly improved the stability of the gateways
at CSS, NTARE, CNUCE and RSRE. However, there are still some
problems left to be solved. Until then, we are continuing to use
PDP/11 gateways at DCEC and UCL.

Claudio Topolcic attended the SATNET Measurement Taskforce meeting at
SHAPE Technical Center, The Hague, Netherlands on 9/24/86. He also
visited UCL, RSRE and NTARE to discuss the ongoing measurement work
with taskforce members who could not attend the meeting. Alex
McKenzie, Bob Hinden and Claudio Topolcic attended the SATNET/ICB
meeting that was held at SHAPE Technical Center on 9/25/86.

WIDEBAND NETWORK

This month's efforts focused on investigating various Wideband
satellite channel problems and completing the development of features
to be included in the next BSAT software release.

Network-wide difficulties with the reception of satellite channel
bursts were tracked down and found to be a frequency problem in the
upconverter at the ISI site. In addition, a slope in the noise floor
of the signal received at the BBN site was determined to be caused by
a faulty RF bandpass filter at BBN.

Automatic monitoring of the power levels of bursts received on the
Wideband channel from selected sites was initiated at BBN in the
latter half of the month. The aim of this monitoring is to
characterize any changes in inter-site power level differences over
time, and to determine the source of such variations. Large enough
inter-site power level differences in a TDMA network such as the
Wideband Net can result in a degradation of the effective satellite
channel performance. Relative power level changes that occur on a
daily or monthly cycle may be indicative of antenna pointing problems
at the sites in question. Preliminary results have shown the power
level difference between the bursts received from the ISI and BBN
sites to vary by 3.5 db.

The software for BSAT Release 2.1 has been frozen and is undergoing
final testing. A Butterfly multiprocessor for use in support of the
BSAT software development and testing was delivered at the end of the
month.

VAX UNIX TCP/IP

In the month of September, the design and implementation of the
"Multicast Agent" for 4.3 BSD Unix was begun. The multicast agent
will be implemented partially inside the Unix kernel, and partially
as a user-level daemon. As the formal specification for the agent
has not yet been finalized, continuing discussion has gone on between
Steve Deering of Stanford University, and Karen Lam. The plan is for
the two of them to write the final specification together.

Testing of the IGMP implementation in the 4.3 BSD kernel also
continued during the month of September.

GATEWAYS

The new software installed in the Satnet Butterfly Gateways is
working well. We have begun discussing with UCL putting the UCL
Butterfly Gateway back on Satnet.

In order to provide better service in light of the current ARPANET
congestion problems, we have begun changing the Butterfly Gateways on
the Wideband network to advertize a lower cost for the Wideband
network than the ARPANET Butterfly Gateways advertize for the
ARPANET. This will cause LAN-LAN traffic (for LAN's which are
connected to the Wideband network) to go over the Wideband network
instead of the ARPANET. This traffic should see reduced and more
consistant delays and of course higher throughput.

The majority of the LSI-11 gateways (Mailbridges and EGP servers
included) are now running the 300 network software. We are working
to install this software in the remaining LSI-11 gateways (Packet
Radio and ARPANET HDH).

Bob Hinden

ISI
---

General

Bob Braden, Annette DeSchon and Paul Mockapetris visited University
College London (UCL) in London, England, Sep 1-5, to discuss current
research topics in the area of computer networks.

During their visit they met with Jon Crowcroft, Ben Bacarisse,
and Mark Riddoch of the UCL Department of Computer Science.
They discussed the Sequential Exchange Protocol (SEP) and a
companion Remote Procedure Call (RPC) system which are being
developed at UCL for use in the ADMIRAL project.
SEP is a transaction protocol that is designed to support sequential
exchanges of potentially large messages. It is the basic for a
RPC system that has been used to implement experimenal applications
including file server access and workstation mail support.

Also discussed were plans for a joint UCL/ISI test using an
implementation of SEP Sequential Exchange Protocol which runs on
a Sun 3 workstation. This test will make use of the SATNET
link between UCL and the ARPANET and will provide data on the
performance of SEP over the Internet.

On September 3-4, Annette and Bob attended a meeting of the
DARPA End-to-End Task Force, and on September 5th they attended
the International One Day Workshop on Protocols for Distributed
Systems.

Paul Mockapetris presented a paper titled "Implementation of the
Domain Name System" at the SIGOPS conference in Amsterdam,
September 8-11.

Jon Postel participated in the IEEE Workshop on Computer
Communications, in Warner Springs, CA. September 24-26.

Jon Postel and Bob Braden attended the NSF-NET Advisory meeting
in Washington, D.C., September 20.

Jon Postel and Ann Westine

Internet Concepts Project

See the General section above.

Multimedia Conferencing Project

Steve Casner attended a demo of the SRI Multimedia Conferencing
system on Monday at NOSC. And see the General section above.

Steve Casner

Supercomputer and Workstation Communication Project

See the General section above.

Computer Center

No internet-related progress to report.

MIT-LCS
-------

August & September Report from MIT-LCS

1. A new version of the NETBLT protocol specification has been
submitted for NIC RFC publication. The revision was based
on extensive testing of NETBLT's performance over long-delay,
high-bandwidth satellite channels. Most of the changes are
related to the computation and use of data timers.

2. A new version of the Pcmail specification has also been submitted.
The revision was based on discussions and comments from a variety
of sources, as well as further research into the design of
interactive Pcmail clients and the use of client machines other
than IBM PCs. One of the major changes is the addition of the
bboard support.

3. Lixia Zhang presented a paper, "Why TCP Timers Don't Work Well",
at the SIGCOMM'86. She also attended the TCP-IP Vendor's Workshop
in Monterey, 25-27 August.

4. Recently we have observed very poor ARPANET performance. Intolerable
network delays and frequent connection closes make the network
virtually unusable during daytime.

Lixia Zhang

NTA & NDRE
----------

No report received.

SRI
---

SRI successfully demonstrated the multimedia conferencing system
(EMCE) at NOSC on September 29. This conferencing system prototype
is implemented on SUN3/160C workstations with digitized voice input
from Speech Periperial Processors (SPPs). The main "content"
(subject) of the conference is a Naval situation map showing friendly,
neutral, and opposing forces derived from real Naval messages.
These messages can be generated and incorporated in real time from a
simulator (Interim Battle Group Tactical Trainer). EMCE allows a
dialogue composed of digital voice and grpahic pointers to occur
between multiple participants viewing the same contents. Local
control of the viewing of the contents (ie, resizing the main
conference window) can be accomplished while maintaining the pointing
references (the conference pointer will circle the same object in all
conferees' windows).

The conference floor control is distributed, using a "talker sense"
algorithm (if your receiver is active you can't talk). Limited feedback
from conferees that do not have the floor is accomodated giving a more
natural interchange (interruptions, agreements, etc..) and maximizing
channel utilizatiion for fixed allocation channels (circuits).

The standard Sun window interface (SunView) has been augmented by a
SRI-developed special display package called PLView written primarily
in prolog. This package has been integrated with the Navy-sponsored
software to give very flexible data representation and access. Natural
language and reasoning modules can be easily added. The content of
the conference is replicated in all workstations (shared workspace) for
robustness and rapid response.

Additional text and image information related to the main contents (the
situation map) can be displayed in a second window. Future plans
include allowing the conference pointer to be in this window, provide
cross window references (show a picture of this ship) and various
manipulations (image magnification).

SRI has completed the recoding and testing of a new MPM software module
for multimedia mail to run on Sun UNIX version 2.2 and 3.0. The SRI
MMM system and BBN'S Diamond can use this module for MM mail transport.
The new version fixes several bugs (thanks to Sun!!) that would not
allow operation on diskless clients. The code has been rewritten to
made it much faster and efficient. Domain addresses of the type now
appearing in the internet host tables can be handled somewhat
intelligently (this is still short of using a full domain name server).
MPM can now be forced to cycle (deliver/receive mail) faster at
times other than one hour. Many flavors of make files are available
for various Sun host configurations (diskless-diskful, YP-nonYP,
2.2/3.0 mix, Sun2/Sun3, ...)

Earl Craighill

UCL
---

Report from UCL for September

1. New PROMS and software were installed in the UCL Butterfly Gateway
at the beginning of the month. Since then, we have been directing a
proportion of our service traffic through it as a test. For the moment,
we are still using the PDP-11 gateway as the direct link to Goonhilly;
the Butterfly connects to Goonhilly via RSRE. Many of the earlier
faults with the Butterfly appear to be cured, but a problem remains
with the exchange of routing information - this causes the gateway to
become isolated approximately once a day, necessitating a restart.

2. We have been conducting some multimedia message tests using the
BBN Diamond system recently installed at UCL. Large multimedia messages,
e.g. longer than 13K bytes, have been successfully sent from UCL to
the Diamond system at BBN. An initial problem was caused by a
buffering restriction in a local gateway on the default route through
UCL - the large buffers necessary for multimedia traffic tended to
kill the performance of the other services through that gateway.
Instead, we persuaded the Diamond system that it was really on a
separate UCL network so that it could talk directly to the UCL
Butterfly Gateway. From there, traffic went via RSRE to Goonhilly.
The current problem is that the remote end appears to receive multiple
copies of each message sent from UCL.

3. Work has started with Bob Braden's benchmark for presentation
levels, looking at the Marshall Rose ASN.1 system in his ISODE and
the UCL Courier-like interface language. Initial measurements agree
with Eric Cooper's analysis that the time-critical part of performance
is allocating buffers for the type conversions. The UCL ESP protocol
service interface allows conversion to be done from buffers straight
to the protocol. This results in a speed up of around 50% in stub code
for simple examples. The ROS/ISODE equivalent and the more complex
example are being worked on.

4. At the beginning of the month, UCL hosted a meeting of the End-to-End
Task Force and also an International Workshop on Protocols for
Distributed Systems. Topics at the latter included Integrated Services
on LANs, MIT's NETBLT, the MACH/Camelot system, the Newcastle
Connection, Internet multicasting, the UK ANSA's Remote Execution
Protocol, and Stanford's VMTP.

5. Claudio Topolcic (BBN) visited UCL in the middle of the month and
had discussions with Peter Lloyd about SATNET measurements. Peter
Kirstein and Jon Crowcroft attended the SATNET & Infrastructure and
ICB meetings at STC, Holland.

Peter Lloyd

UDEL
----

1. Enough of my gear from Linkabit has been moved to the University
of Delaware to bring up a fuzzball on the UDel Etherswamp. It's first
duty was to facilitate a few fixes which improved gateway performance
between that swamp and the ARPANET.

2. A good deal of muscle went into moving and reconfigurating equipment at
Linkabit in order to sustain ARPANET connectivity for the NSFNET crowd
and improve maintainability. Linkabit will continue to operate that
swamp (with my help) for mail distribution and for support of other
projects.

3. Effort continued on the design and simulation of routing algorithms for
MSS. I presented preliminary results of this study at the at the SURAN
Implementors meeting at BBN.

4. The NSFNET Backbone traffic continues to escalate, tripling during the
month to about a megapacket per week via DCN-GATEWAY, presently the only
ARPANET valve feeding this plumbing. A dedicated gateway now being
installed at CMU is to pick up most of this traffic and relieve
DCN-GATEWAY and a backup gateway at Cornell. The new Unix gateway
daemon mentioned last month is functioning well in the Cornell
gateway and even survived panic for a week when DCN-GATEWAY was
isolated due to broken lines and IMPs. While the conglomerated NSF swamp is presently functioning well, many issues involving stability,
metric compatibility and core-hop ambiguity remain to be resolved.

5. I implemented, installed and tested a new Network Time Protocol (NTP)
daemon for the fuzzball. The new daemon operates in symmetric mode with
multiple peers, as suggested in RFC958, and employs some of the fancy
filtering and smoothing algorithms described in RFC956. Preliminary
results suggest clock synchronization to within a few tens of
milliseconds should be possible via typical Internet paths. Eventually, this daemon will be installed in the various isolated fuzzball swamps
that do not have local radio clocks.

Dave Mills

TASK FORCE REPORTS
------------------

APPLICATIONS

No report received.

END-TO-END SERVICES

No progress to report this month.

INTERNET ARCHITECTURE

1. Preparations continue for the upcoming meeting at SRI. I have
invited Scott Brim of Cornell to discuss NSFNET routing issues and
Doug Comer of Purdue to discuss the CYPRESS project and its impact
on the Internet. Phill Gross and I worked out a schedule for the
joint INENG/INARC meeting day, which will involve presentations
from both communities on issues of common interest.

2. A special-interest group has formed to study issues involved with
campus networks, in particular the state and regional networks
associated with the NSF community. The participants, including
some INARC and INENG members, as well as several gurus and wizards
from various organizations, have set up a mail list on which to babble.

Dave Mills

INTERNET ENGINEERING

No report received.

INTEROPERABILITY

Deborah L. Estrin is replacing Robert Cole as the chairman of
the Interoperability Task Force. The next activity will be to
review the current version of the "Research Issues in
Autonomous Systems" draft, and to establish
a more concrete agenda for how to proceed from there.
If anyone is interested in participating in the Task Force
please contact Deborah at "estrin@USC-CSE.USC.EDU".

Deborah L. Estrin

PRIVACY

The Privacy Task Force held a successful 2-day meeting on
11-12 September at UCL, hosted by Steve Wilbur. Attending members
were: Steve Kent, John Linn, Dan Nessett, Mike Padlipsky, Rob Shirey,
and Steve Wilbur, with guests Danny Cohen, Charles Fox, Jim Hopkins,
Steve Kille, and John Laws.

We discussed a set of changes to be made to the draft RFC on
electronic mail encipherment and authentication procedures. An
option allowing selective application of encryption will be provided,
and procedures involved in manual dissemination of interchange
keys will be discussed. We expect that a revised RFC will be
reviewed by the membership and distributed to the Internet
community before our next meeting.

We discussed a number of significant issues related to future automated key management mechanisms to support electronic mail privacy, and
appreciated presentations by three guest speakers: Danny Cohen on
a proposed privacy mode for TCP, Steve Kille on the developing
state of CCITT directory service mechanisms, and Jim Hopkins on the
state of the ISO security architecture addendum.