Page1    Page16                                                                        Page18  Page177

NLR's membership is drawn from leading public and private higher education institutions that

participate in or own and operate their own regional optical networks (RONs). A 16-person Board

of Directors consisting of, one director appointed by each of the 14 members and two active

researchers plus the Chief Scientist, distinguished computer scientist Dave Farber, provide

governance stewardship over NLR resources and services on behalf of the entire community.

Companies from the information technology industry, especially Cisco Systems, are strategic

participants in NLR's efforts.

Goals:

The principal goals of NLR are to:

1.

Support experimental and production networks based on member needs,

2.

Foster networking research,

3.

Promote next-generation applications and services, and

4.

Facilitate interconnectivity among high-performance research and education networks.

Strategies:

The key implementation strategies of NLR are to:

1.

Focus on meeting the needs of network researchers and researchers with "big" scientific

applications,

2.

Ensure R&E ownership of the national network infrastructure and foster R&E ownership

of the network infrastructure end to end,

3.

Be driven by the needs and requirements of the RONs and their members,

4.

Partner with national research and education networks (NRENs) across the globe, and

5.

Provide cost-effective and cost-efficient services and resources to the community.

Infrastructure:

One defining characteristic of the NLR infrastructure is that the architecture supports many

distinct networks for the research community using the same core infrastructure. Experimental

and production networks exists side-by-side but are physically and operationally separate.

Production networks support cutting-edge applications by providing users guaranteed levels of

reliability, availability, and performance. At the same time, experimental networks enable the

deployment and testing of new networking technologies, providing network researchers national-

scale test beds without the limitations typically associated with production networks.

Another defining characteristic related to the infrastructure is the Acceptable Use Policy. NLR

itself has no Acceptable Use Policy, so is not constrained by third-party rules. NLR users

determine appropriate uses, applications, and services for the network capacity that they directly

control.

The current foundation of the NLR infrastructure is the dense wave division multiplexing

(DWDM)-based national optical footprint using Cisco Systems' 15808 and 15454 optical

electronic systems, with a capacity 40 and 32 wavelengths per fiber pair respectively. Each

wavelength can support transmission at 10 billion bits per second (10 Gbps). This optical system

has been deployed nationwide across nearly 12,000 route-miles of dark fiber that NLR acquired

from Level 3 Communications.

17