The firm said the Infranet Initiative project will look at a new approach to public network infrastructure that addresses the problems inherent in today’s internet and will build a network that is neither the public internet nor a private network.
It sounds like a reinvention of the Internet. However, in reality it is more like a standards initiative. It uses IP, the Internet Protocol, and it would work, more or less, on existing Internet infrastructure.
According to Juniper, the Internet as it works today concerns itself with two things – connectivity and bandwidth. The quality, security, and reliability needed by complex mission-critical applications are not there.
What the internet needs, according to Juniper, is a way that service providers can offer guaranteed premium quality services to their users over the internet, where the service provider only controls one portion of the network.
Currently, if a service provider wants to tag certain traffic for optimal performance, it can do so, but only within the confines of its own network. There is no way to tell a peering partner to treat the traffic similarly, and to reward them for doing so.
In effect, Juniper wants to create two standards. The Infranet User-Network Interface (I-UNI) would deal with communication between application and network. The Infranet Intra-Carrier Interface (I-ICI) would deal with communication between networks.
The I-ICI would be like a souped-up border gateway protocol. BGP tables sit between networks and make routing decisions. I-ICI would sit there and describe how much bandwidth, for example, to give to certain types of traffic.
Standard ways would be needed to conduct this inter-network communication, and standard ways would be needed for each carrier to pay the other one for treating its premium traffic differently.
Service providers would be able to then offer premium-priced services to enterprise customers, such as better quality, more secure virtual private networks, low-latency streaming video, voice over IP and content delivery.
The I-UNI standard would deal with the way applications tell the network what kind of traffic they are providing and how it should be treated. A streaming video application could tell the network to treat its traffic as a bandwidth priority, for example.
Juniper say the idea is not to completely reinvent the wheel when it comes to the standards, but to make changes to existing technologies to achieve these goals. Compatible work is ongoing in the DSL Forum, IETF and ITU.
For Juniper’s vision to come to fruition, it will almost certainly need the support of its networking rivals, notably Cisco Systems Inc. [CSCO]. Lucent Technologies [LU] is the only other company to so far publicly express support, though Juniper is talking to others.
This article was based on material originally published by ComputerWire.
