Higher education faculty, staff and students are challenging teaching and learning paradigms through innovative connections with other colleges, universities, research labs, performing arts centers and an immense array of other resources over advanced networks.

IPv6 Addressing

IPv6 is the next version of the Internet Protocol, the data packaging and routing standard on which the Internet is based. The current version is IPv4; IPv5 was experimental and was never widely deployed.IPv6 offers several improvements over IPv4. Most importantly, with 128-bit Internet addresses instead of the 32-bit addresses of IPv4, IPv6 vastly increases the number of addresses available from about 4 billion to about 340 trillion trillion trillion.

Given the continued rapid growth of the Internet, ensuring an abundance of addresses is crucial. The proliferation of wired and (especially) wireless devices means that in the near future not one or two, but many addresses will be required for each person who uses the Internet. The techniques currently employed to cope with the shortage of IPv4 addresses are reaching their limits, and many of these techniques — such as temporary address assignment and network address translation — compromise engineering principles fundamental to the Internet’s success, thus jeopardizing its future growth.

Megaconference

Each year, the Megaconference occurs as a result of a tremendous amount of volunteer effort and good will, with the goal of connecting people together everywhere on Earth where someone chooses to participate, in order to further the use of videoconferencing in education and research and to advance the state of the art in videoconferencing technology. 
On the chosen date, speakers from across the globe share their latest real-world uses of H.323 videoconferencing and other compatible systems, while using these videoconferencing systems to do so. The audience consists of active participants who have access to advanced Internet connectivity and an H.323 or other compatible videoconferencing endpoint, and observers who watch the simultaneous stream using a web browser and freely available stream players.

Megaconference Jr.

Megaconference Jr. is a project designed to give students in elementary and secondary schools around the world the opportunity to communicate, collaborate and contribute to each other's learning in real time, using advanced multi-point video conferencing technology. Presenters will design and conduct videoconference-based presentations and activities focused on both academic and cultural issues. Participants are able to address questions to presenters and to collaborate with geographically diverse peers in collaborative learning activities, thus building international cultural awareness.

Multicast

Multicast is a set of technologies that enables efficient delivery of data to many locations on a network. In today’s Internet, the dominant model of communication is “unicast”—the data source must create a separate copy of the data for each recipient. When there are many recipients, and when large amounts of data (e.g. streaming video) are being sent, unicast becomes prohibitively wasteful of bandwidth. The key idea behind multicast is to create each recipient's copy of each message at a point as close to that recipient as possible, thus minimizing the bandwidth consumed. In July 2007, MAGPI worked with the Friends of Live Earth Global Screens Program to send out a 30 mbps webstream of the 24-hour Live Earth Concert to campuses and organizations on the MAGPI and Internet2 networks, as well as other research and education networks worldwide. Northwestern University and Video Furnace, in collaboration with C-SPAN and Internet2, make live, high-quality C-SPAN and C-SPAN2 broadcasts [PDF] available 24 hours a day to anyone with an Internet2 network connection that is multicast capable.

Phoebus

Conceived and developed by University of Delaware researchers, Phoebus establishes a new network framework and protocol that brings the high performance of advanced backbone networks all the way to the end-user’s desktop. Designed to improve end-to-end throughput for long-distance data transfers, Phoebus embeds greater “intelligence” in the network, enabling it to choose the best transport technology for any application based on its needs and the available network resources at application run-time. Phoebus works by transparently splitting the full network path into distinct segments at specific adaptation points called “Phoebus gateways” and then finding the best path for the data on a segment-by-segment basis, which could include a combination of IP and dedicated optical circuits. With little to no modification needed by the end-user, applications that utilize Phoebus have experienced significantly improved throughput.