an old doc of mine that I found dated 2/17/96 -- A Vision for Penn 2000 in Computer/Communications

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

A Vision for Penn 2000 in Computer/Communications

David Farber
The Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Telecommunication Systems
University of Pennsylvania
2/17/96

I would like to propose a vision of what  computing and  
communications on the Penn campus can and should look like in the  
year 2000 – in the world of the Global Information Infrastructure   
(GII).  I will propose a system which supports an improved “way of  
life” for the students and staff. Issues will be examined that bear  
on teaching, safety, education and living. Each technology will  
support improvement in one of these areas.

A Scenario for Education in the early 21 St.  Century

The dawn of the Global Information Infrastructure -  the GII,  offers  
a set of challenges for governmental, industrial and education  
organizations. The ability to extend their operation past their  
national boundaries offers both problems and opportunities for these  
organizations.  The governments can provide the international  
atmosphere and resources required to bootstrap the GII by expressing  
their visions. To avoid an abundance of technical pitfalls, it is  
important to stress the fact that the development of the GII should  
be application driven, NOT technology driven. The potential technical  
solutions are there, but must be selected according to their usefulness.
Nowhere are the challenges greater than in the possibilities that the  
GII offers in education. There is no better way to create  
international understanding, friendship and exchange than  
communication and cooperation between schools and students all over  
the world at all levels. Education applications  cover most potential  
uses of the GII and impose demanding requirements on the  
infrastructure. Education is also an area where the public interest  
is evident.
The role of the universities in educating the citizens who will lead  
their nations into this future calls upon them to pioneer the  
exploration of the benefits to be gained as well as the problems to  
be faced in this new world. Exploration of the Modern Worldwide Multi- 
Campus University - University of Cyberspace - interacting with lower  
grade schools and continuing education to provide individual-centered  
lifelong learning, should therefore be included in the our vision.  
The intent should be not to just perform experiments with exchange of  
courses over the network but rather to explore, understand and solve  
the complicated issues of inter-organizational operation, economics,  
national laws and tradition that must be solved in order to create  
such an extended University.  Perhaps most important, however, we  
must understand how such an organization can enrich University life  
for the students as well as the faculty. The design of the University  
must address this issue with highest priority if it is to be a success.

We  strongly believe that the lessons to be learned from this effort  
will show the way for better understanding of how industry and  
governments can use the GII. This effort will contribute to new  
strategic knowledge necessary to cope with the global structural  
change of the telecommunications, media and information industries  
which is expected to lead to an information society. This rapid  
change calls for extraordinary programs in research and education to  
provide the competence necessary in government, industry, among users  
and all parts of society. However, the most important outcome will be  
to create a new generation of future leaders who have lived and  
learned in the borderless world of the GII and who thus will be  
better prepared to understand and control the structural changes  
being created by the information society in order to secure fuller  
more meaningful employment and social welfare for their people.
TECHNICAL VISIONS
Information technology will continue to develop extremely fast. The  
life-time of any particular technology is hard to predict but is in  
general decreasing. It is therefore important to focus on invariable  
requirements and be open to new technologies implementing them. The  
increasing demands for broadband mobile access to high-performance  
communication, computing and information services seem to constitute  
such requirements.
A reasonable technical vision for the GII for the first decade of the  
21st century would be that
·      Walls become interactive and connected (at 1-10 Gbit/s) to a  
global high-performance infrastructure.
·      Personal C&C systems are integrated in multimodal wearables,  
including goggles, augmenting reality by overlaying information and  
providing a billion users with mobile wireless access (at 10-155 Mbit/ 
s) to a high-performance infrastructure.
·      Personal software assistants help manage information, provide  
decision support, etc
·      The High-Performance Infrastructure will include high- 
performance computing and server facilities and support mobile  
multicast services with dynamic quality of service requirements,  
including the necessary real-time properties supporting interactive  
distributed applications. Distributed switching of terabit/s of  
aggregate data flows from connections with dynamic characteristics  
should be supported.
·      The cost of personal multimedia communication should be as low  
as telephone calls today

It is evident that not many existing, or even emerging, technologies  
scale to cope with this vision. GII testbeds should therefore not  
prescribe any particular technology but allow for experiments at all  
levels. The issues to be explored include:
* What will future telecommunication systems architectures be? The  
research community and industry should cooperate in industrial  
application projects to extract realistic systems requirements as  
input to research programs.
* How will they be realized? This issue requires interdisciplinary  
research to study realization schemes with optimal price/performance  
ratios, from usage schemes and man-machine interaction, via computing  
and communication systems, to photonics and wireless component  
technologies.
* How will we transition to these systems and how will these system  
interoperate with legacy systems? Again the research community and  
industry must interact closely to ensure realistic scaling properties  
and design migration strategies.
PROPOSAL FOR AN APPLICATION DRIVEN EVALUATION OF GII TECHNOLOGY AND  
ITS IMPACTS
In the spirit of the development outlined above, we propose to create  
a “University of Cyberspace” composed of four leading institutions in  
Europe and the USA chosen to reflect a diversity of style and focus,  
different national traditions in education and a strong internal  
understanding of the technology and its potential. We intend that the  
“University of Cyberspace” will expand beyond the initial four and  
the USA and Europe as we gain a better understanding of what must be  
done and what the impacts are of the cultural and legal differences  
between the participants.
A first goal is to establish a commonly ackowledged one-year  
curriculum on technical, social, legal, administrative and other  
aspects of the GII itself. The curriculum spans half a year of  
courses and a half-year thesis work and could be used either as part  
of a senior undergraduate or a as part of a first year graduate  
education. Experiments will be conducted 1995-1996 and formal start  
will be January 1 1997. The vision is to allow students and faculty  
to communicate and access course material and other information  
globally, from the involved campuses, homes and wherever they can get  
access to the GII. The communication can be in terms of * seminars,  
lectures and recitations with multicast multimedia interaction in  
real-time or accessed asynchronously from servers * computer-mediated  
conferences * advising via email
These applications will be driving the evaluation of various aspects  
of the GII:
·      Social and cultural issues related to student life, faculty  
career planning, etc
·      Administrative, Economical and Legal issues related to faculty  
and staff exchange, tuition, student living costs, intelectual  
property rights, etc
·      Technical aspects: evaluation of candidate communication  
system architectures for the GII including protocol hierarchies,  
switching and medium-access technologies, such as ATM, SDH/SONET,  
DTM, etc. Issues to be evaluated should include cost/performance,  
scalability an other key parameters

What will the life of a Penn student be like

Where do they learn

The student of the future at Penn will have a vastly enhanced set of  
educational opportunities. Courses and seminars will be attended  
often remotely thus providing students with the opportunities of  
sitting in on classes taught by the best in the world in the subjects  
of interest. For example, first year Physics students will be able to  
attend lectures by the Feynman  of their day. A student will be able  
to attend seminars in Japanese history being held at the University  
of Tokyo. All this educational opportunity will be coordinated by the  
Penn faculty who can then devote their educational time to  
interaction with students, helping small groups of students to  
understand what they have heard, teaching their specialties

First an overall image of what I have in mind for Penn. I envision  a  
campus with communications focused on two key areas. One is person  
based and  features mobility and the integration of voice and data  
into a personal communicator offering voice and data services, for  
example two way “paging”, appointment handling, personal security,  
access to information like WWW as well as inexpensive voice all  
utilizing IP data paths. The other is based on ultra high speed  
communications allowing the creation on the campus of a meta-computer  
environment allowing the collection of all the computing capabilities  
of the campus into a computer power utility from which one can draw  
power (machines, storage etc.) as needed and for as long as needed.

A Scenario  of a Student’s use

A student is walking around the campus with the UPenn Personal  
Assistant (UPA) in hand. The UPA is a device the size of a Sony  
MagicLink  (~ 4x6 inches) with a flip cover backlite  color screen  
and a keyboard integrated into the cover plus a pen etc. There is a  
combined headset microphone cord plugged into the unit. The student  
can make and receive calls via the UPA. The voice is carried over the  
same IP radio channel used for data transfers to the UPA. All “phone”  
traffic is IP based and thus when the student gets to their dorm  
room, they may receive calls via the UPA or their desktop computer in  
a seamless manner. The UPA and any workstation so authorized can  
function as a “answering machine”.

In addition, the UPA is the student electronic wallet allowing the  
student to pay for and receive payment via the UPA utilizing one of  
the secure smartcards  that will be available.

The speed of the radio link is 128 or 256 kb and is composed of micro- 
cells utilizing phase 2 HandyPhone (NTT) or equivalent technology. It  
is operated by Penn and thus is de-coupled from the tariffs and  
limitations of normal telephone service.

As part of the services offered for the mobile student, a 911  
capability is supplied via a “red” button on the UPA. When the 911  
button is pushed the student is paced in voice contact with campus  
security and the exact location of the UPA (and this the student) is  
sent to the security people as determined by  the micro-cellular   
system. The two way voice allows advise to the student will the  
nearest police is vectored to them. Note the location of each police- 
person is determined in a similar fashion and thus the campus  
computer complex can optimize the dispatching.

Subject to the limitations of the bandwidth (which is reasonably  
high) limited video will also be available to the UPA while it is  
mobile.

When the student goes to their dorm, classroom or library, the UPA  
will plug into the campus network (the structure of that will be  
described latter). They will then have access to the campus  
metacomputer  (see Farber88 et al). The campus metacomputer has been  
created by pooling all the workstations etc. of the Penn campus into  
a distributed system operating similar to a large multiprocessor  
system.  When a user is not actively utilizing the processor/memory  
of their workstation, that capability is made available to other  
users (in a seamless fashion) to allow them to enlarge their  
computing power or memory etc. for short  or long periods. The owner  
of the borrowed workstation is guaranteed  to have their computing  
capability on demand either by shifting the borrowing program to  
another unit or giving the workstation ownder anoither system.  
Performance will not be affected.

Thus the UPA owner has the ability either over the wireless links  
(with decreased performance ) or over the campus net to have in their  
hands a supercomputer if needed.  If the student sits down at a  
workstation (better graphics etc.), all the information in their UPA  
is seamlessly usable from the workstation and  and information can be  
stored on the UPA for latter use.

As has been suggested above the Penn network will be called upon to  
carry not only the normal computer traffic we now see but all the  
campus voice and video and the load of the campus metacomputer  
traffic.  That suggests paths of a minimum of 620 megabit per second   
for local distribution within buildings and complexes and much higher  
capabilities  -- 2.5 gigabit per second and experimentation with all  
optical at 9.6 gps per wavelength with 16-32 wavelengths used  for  
the campus inter-tie (backbone)  system. Within the time frame of the  
implementation of the new structure, all optical switching may become  
practical for use in such an inter-tie network.  The exact structure  
of the complex and how it handles legacy systems is a matter for  
study in the near future.

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