USC/ISI will create and maintain TRAIL, Testbed Routers for Advanced Internet Labs. The TRAIL software will be a freely available, well maintained, community research router source, featuring IPv6 in particular. The work will extend and leverage developments and facilities of the Collaborative Advanced Interagency Research Network (CAIRN), organized by ISI under current DARPA funding. CAIRN is a T1, DS-3 and OC-3 wide area router testbed. The software is for two classes of hardware: 1) high performance but low-cost personal computers, supporting small numbers of router interfaces and 2) specialized router hardware, supporting the large numbers of interfaces that are characteristic of internet interconnect points, and providing a realistic experimental model of commercial IP routing technology. For the second class of hardware, one vendor who supports such numbers of high-speed interfaces proved interested in donating full source code to be used as the base of TRAIL. Therefore, the second class of hardware for TRAIL is the Ascend/Netstar, Gigarouter. It supports 32 OC-3 ATM ports, or combinations of ATM ports with 16 to 128 fast ethernet ports. The proposal focuses strongly on support of experimental users. ISI's care will be devoted to supporting their software, and maintaining and distributing versions for PC alone, and for PC along with Gigarouter. ISI will also maintain facilities for IPv6 networking research collaboration, and coordinate the North American portion of the experimental IPv6 backbone, the "6bone".
