Technical Overview of the National Information Infrastructure: Technology & Trends

- - - - By: Emily Ta Papadopoulos
        
        CSC
        
        papadopoet@post3.laafb.af.mil

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In recent years, the vision and benefits of the National Information Infrastructure (NII) are debated by professionals belonging to a multitude of disciplines. Its success is critical in implementing Electronic Commerce, which has the potential of further improving US competitiveness in the global marketplace. Often, however, the NII is positioned as a "utopia in cyberspace", with no planning and no progress achieved. The purpose of this paper is threefold: to provide a technical overview of its architecture, present important applications, and highlight potential roadblocks in future implementation.

According to Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, infrastructure is "the underlying foundation or basic framework of a system or organization." Transportation, energy, water and sewer systems, and telephone systems are examples of societal infrastructures, used in varying forms and degrees by everyone. A useful, well-planned infrastructure generally has in varying degrees the following characteristics

"Shareability": Common resources offer economies of scale, minimize duplicative efforts, and if appropriately organized encourage the introduction of competing innovative solutions.
Ubiquity: All potential users can readily take advantage of the infrastructure and what it provides.
Integrity: The infrastructure operates at such a high level of manageability and reliability that it is often noticeable only when it ceases to function effectively.
Ease of use: There are logical and consistent (preferably intuitive) rules and procedures for the infrastructure's use.
Cost effectiveness: The value provided must be consistent with cost or the infrastructure simply will not be built or sustained.
Standards: The basic elements of the infrastructure and the ways in which they interrelate are clearly defined and stable over time.
Openness: The public infrastructure is available to all people on a nondiscriminatory basis

NII, an advanced information infrastructure, will integrate and interconnect these components in a technologically neutral manner so that no one industry will be favored over any other. Most importantly, the NII is laying the foundations for living in the Information Age and for making these technological advances useful to the public, business, libraries, and other non-governmental entities. That is why, beyond the physical components of the infrastructure, the value of the NII to users and the nation will depend in large part on the quality of its other elements.

WHAT IS NII?

1.	Promote private sector investment
2.	Extend the universal service concept to ensure that information resources
	are available to all at affordable prices
3.	Act as a catalyst to promote tehcnological innovation and new applications
4.	Promote seamless, interactive, user-driven operation of the NII
5.	Ensure information security and network reliability
6.	Improve management of the radio frequency spectrum
7.	Protect intellectual property rights
8.	Coordinate with other levels of government and with other nations
9.	Provide access to governement information and improve government procurement

Table 1.The Clinton Administration Report

Source: Introduction to NII on the Internet

NII stands for National Information Infrastructure; its popular and informal name is the Information Superhighway. NII is a collection of electronic pathways that will provide information -- news, entertainment, business, personal communications -- to the people who want, need and are willing to pay for it. The information will be easily accessible from practically anywhere in a variety of formats, including text, audio, images, and video.

NII is supported by the Clinton Administration and was initiated by Vice President Al Core. The government is actively involved in the NII by providing the legal framework; its role and principles in promoting the emerging NII is defined in the Clinton Administration report (the first comprehensive statement) as shown in table 1.

NII FUNCTIONAL LAYERS

The NII can be viewed as three layers of functions: applications, services, and networking infrastructure.

Figure 1. Conceptual layout of the NII, showing functional layers and aspects

Source: Merit Networks, Inc.

Networks, are the "data pipes", the cable, fiber optics, and other means of transmission, plus controlling software to transmit data from one place to another. These components comprise the computing and communications platforms or hardware (and associated low-level systems software) of computers, peripherals, switching systems, telephones, and information processing devices, together with the communications media, such as fiber cable, and electromagnetic spectrum.
Services provide the building blocks for applications and provide the interfaces for displays, sensors, and other input/output devices. For example, a library retrieval system would require at least two services to complete an information exchange: a text search service and a file transfer service. Enabling services are classified as generic and domain-specific.
Applications are information processing tools that "do something" for a user. The underlying enabling services and physical infrastructure supply the means by which applications deliver their functionality. Examples of applications include conducting a financial transaction; sending, receiving, and sorting mail; browsing for information; and interacting with other persons or computer systems. To facilitate the development of applications, the NII's enabling services layer should present well-defined application programming interfaces (APIs).

NII FUNCTIONALITY ASPECTS

Each of the component layers should be considered from the three related aspects of functionality, trust, and control. For example, one component of trust is to protect a system from unauthorized access; every system should have the degree of such protection that is appropriate for its purposes. Thus, the NII should be examined to ensure that adequate protection is achieved within each of its component layers.

Functionality describes each component's responsibility to the system as a whole. Directly or indirectly, each component must help users accomplish a task. Functionality suggests the interfaces, usability, and localization required for each functional component.
Trust has three major sub-elements: security, integrity, and assurance of performance. Security describes a system's ability to ensure adequate protection, accessibility, and integrity of information. Integrity includes such concepts as graceful degradation of performance in the event of failure, recovery after failure, and fault tolerance.
Control includes four major sub-elements: manageability, serviceability, measurement, and adaptability.

APPLICATIONS FOR NII

Future applications will occur in areas such as education, public Electronic Data Interexchange (EDI), Environmental Monitoring and Natural Resource Management, Government Services, Health Care, Libraries and Manufacturing. This paper will only cover the Internet application since they are most common use.

The Internet concept was introduced in 1957, developed by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) within the Department of Defense for scientific researching and government internal communications. The Internet is a decentralized network-of-networks that run on the standard TCP/IP protocols (see fig 2) . TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) converts and fragments messages from point A to B while IP (Internet Protocol) handles the addressing, and the routing of packets across multiple nodes and network with different standards (such as X.25, 802.3, 802.6). The four most common usages of the Internet today are electronic mail, topical discussion groups, WWW distributed computing and file transfer. Future usage will include electronic shopping, business workflow, virtual libraries, electronic periodicals, and computer based training (CBT).

Fig 2. The Internet backbone today

Source: Merit Networks, Inc.

SOCIOTECHNICAL IMPACTS OF THE NII

The ever increasing rate of technological change in communications networks in the past ten years has affected our lives both positively as well as negatively. It is transforming the way American business and entrepreneurs manage their organizations. It is empowering us in the following ways:

Entrepreneurs are starting small businesses providing services made possible by the new information technologies, such as, Internet provider.
Employees are telecommuting from their homes
Businesses are using computers and information technology to increase productivity and profits
Students in rural areas are taking courses offered by professors at universities hundreds of mile away via interactive videoconferencing
Doctors are treating patients in countries far away from their hospitals using telemedicine
Citizens are sending electronic messages to government officials and are receiving government documents electronically, such as IRS tax forms
Disabled Americans are using networks to communicate with others, both on the job and from home.

Similarly, the advanced technological change also had a negative impact to society - further diminishing the role of the blue color work force.

CONCLUSION

Over the years, the existing communications infrastructure has inhibited the NII to provide integrated voice, data, and video services. However, the communications industry is beginning to introduce several new and innovative technologies that will allow the delivery of many of the advanced services and capabilities of the NII. These include Personal Communication Services (PCS), Cellular Digitized, Packetized Data (CDPD), Direct Broadcasting Systems (DBS), ISDN and B-ISDN.

Although the NII is far from complete, the last two years have seen considerable progress in many fronts. The NII is not a cliff which suddenly confronts us, but rather a slope -- one that society has been climbing since postal services and semaphore networks were established. An information infrastructure has existed for a long time, continuously evolving with each new advance in communications technology. What is different today is that we are closer than ever to imagining a future when all the independent infrastructures are combined to provide seamless consumer services via a organized system of layered and interoperable, but transparent, applications.

References:

Cross-Industry Working Team (1995) "An Architectural Framework for the National Information Infrastructure."

Gage, B. and L. Henderson, (1996) " Voice over ATM " Network World, March 11, 45-52.

Goverment Accounting Office - Report to the Congress (1995) "Information Superhighway - an Overview of Technology Challenges." GAO/AIMD-95-23

Coussesn, B. B (1995) " Electronic Commerce is Here - Now What? " E-COMM, (September-October), 5-6.

National Performance Review, " From Red Tape to Results: Creating a Government That Works Better & Costs Less" September 7, 1993.