ISI, in the person of Bob Braden, propose to develop and engineer transport protocols to facilitate advanced applications over the Internet. One task is to experiment with a wide-area multicast protocol using the facilities of a DARPA-provided gateway. Multicast is not currently used in the Internet, but its implementation could significantly reduce the traffic generated by such applications as network news, bulletin boards, and mailing lists. A second early task is to test the suitability of two new transport protocols (VMTP, due to Cheriton, and Rx) in place of the customary TCP and UDP as support for higher level transaction-based protocols. Availability of transaction protocols on the Internet would allow atomic operations to be communicated over the Internet with a sequence of datagrams. In the second year of the project, the interaction of transport protocols and gateway dynamics (as affected by resource allocation algorithms and queue disciplines) will be investigated. Subsidiary tasks include bug fixes and maintenance releases of NNStat/statspy, a widely-used network monitoring package originally developed by the PI (and others at ISI). Funds are also provided for Braden to continue to act as Executive Director of the Internet Activities Board (IAB), and to chair the End-to-End Task Force of the IAB.
