The DTI's UK online for business exists to help UK small businesses
exploit
the business benefits
of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) - a major driver of
competitiveness.
We made a final presentation of our work at the
HPIP workshop.
The project had an Open Day at UCL, just after the end of
the technical work, at which UCL, WDI and Prism Technologies will be
demonstrating and talking about their work. This occurred on
January the 16th, 1997. An
outline of the day.
Mail lists
and minutes of the
kickoff
first
second
third
fourth
and
final
project meetings are available.
and the text of a talk at the
DTI HPIP
Feb 96 Workshop
If you are interested in the misuse of the term bandwidth by computer
scientists, have a look at this list of
papers that refer to digital channel residual error free capacity
as bandwidth....seems to be acceptable now!
Acronyms
Expanded
In the last few years the Internet has experienced phenomenal
growth. Commercial companies now account for more than half the
users of the network and increasingly they are using the Internet
protocols in their internal networks. Demand for network resources
is outstripping availability. This raises questions about how
the finite resources in networks should be allocated. A major
problem is ensuring that critical business applications receive
appropriate resources so that they can operate reliably and efficiently.
This case for support from the LINK scheme outlines a novel programme
of research aimed at addressing just such a problem. It will first
analyse the data traffic patterns of applications in operational
commercial networks that use the Internet protocols. The programme
will then use the results of this analysis to develop a network
management system that will distribute resources in such a way
that key applications can receive priority without impairing the
performance of other applications.
As distributed applications become more crucial to corporate competitiveness,
network congestion becomes a more serious issue. The proposal
addresses this problem, but does so in a way that accounts for
commercial requirements from the outset, giving network administrators
the degree of visibility and control over their installations
that they demand.
The aim of this project is to examine the interaction between
distributed applications and the network, and to develop a resource
allocation management system which can be used to ensure that
critical applications have the network resources they need to
operate efficiently. This system will operate by providing sources
of network traffic information on the state of the network using
standard network management protocols. Two methods of controlling
the sources of network traffic will be investigated. One method
will be through the manipulation of the protocol stack software
on individual machines, controlled to a resolution that affects
the traffic injected into the network by different applications.
The other approach will involve controlling the application directly
in order to change the volume of network traffic it generates.
The resource allocation management system will be demonstrated
by the development of a prototype.
The original proposal
details
are a tad different from how the project has ended up.
Project Documentation
The Project