Academic Computer Networks, Technological Opportunities for Late Comers: Turkish Case

Abstract

This paper tries to describe overwhelming importance of the InformationTechnology especially Wide Area Networks (WAN) in research anddevelopment process. Changing usage pattern of WANs, new and enhancednetwork services and their technological consequences reviewed in thelight of Turkish experience.Information Technology and Science CommunityInformation technology (IT) is now one of the most important resourcesavailable to science system. IT based relationships that have arisen inthe science community over the last two decades validated the potentialof using WANs to link scientists around the world, to promotecollaboration, to disseminate new ideas, and to make efficient use ofscientific information.(1)WANs have brought new possibilities for the communication of ideas thatin turn restructuring the ways in which institutions and individualsinteract. The originator of the restructuring, scientific community, hasalso facing a paradigm shirt. IT have profoundly influenced the wayscientists work and the way the scientific work conducted. A plenty ofnew tool mainly for information retrieval and storage, remote sensingand tele-experimenting besides advanced laboratory equipment have beenintroduced by IT and WANs. The way the scientific work conducted hasalso a social organization. The rate of change is limited by theadaptation rate of organizations and institutions.IT brings the capability to scientist to introduce their new ideas tothe attention of the scientific community as soon as they arise.Electronic journal and pre-print archives accelerate the disseminationof information by eliminating the delay in the paper publication. Thepotential of the electronic publication is not fully used mainly becausethe quality assessment system of the scientific community is still basedon peer reviewed paper publication. As the peer reviewed electronicpublication phase out peer review paper publication, dissemination ofscientific result will further accelerate. In the new paradigm, accessto WAN facilities and to scientific information in digital form isnecessity for high-quality training and education. One of the new goalof the training and education is now to explore and extensively use thepossibilities of WANs and new information services.WANs are setting np a virtual community which brings new possibilitiesfor the interaction between the actors of the national innovationsystem. The proper use of the possibilities may help the improvement ofcollaboration between the universities and the industry.Changing Usage Patients of WANs and The Technical ConsequencesThe usage patters of WAN services in the above four area, namely the wayscientist work, the way the scientific information disseminate, the waythe new researchers trained and the way of interaction between actors ofnational innovation has been changed since the WAN services hadintroduced in early 1970s.In the early 1970's the main goal of the WANs was to effectively use theexpensive computation power. As the computation power and communicationhas became cheaper and cheaper, main goal had shifted to create acommunication environment. By the end of 1980s an other important goalis concatenated to communication goal : access to information. With theadvent of World Wide Web (WWW) in 1991, the form of communication andinformation has been shirting from text to multimedia. Multimedia mailand video phone over WANs will phase out text based e-mail and chatapplications.Today WANs are using TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/InternetProtocol) for transmission and addressing of computers respectively Butthe changing usage patterns and especially multimedia communication andmultimedia documentation forces the limits of TCP/IP and routing. Toassess the performance of the TCP/IP and routing it is necessary toreview the design requirements of the TCP/IP.Like most of the other technological progress, the conceptualdevelopment of the wide area network had inspired from a military need.As a result redundancy and reliability requirement of the military use,TCP operate in connectionless mode based on packet switching circuittechnology. Each packet in this operation mode is forwarded trough thenetwork until it reaches the target indicated by the target IP number.The devices that read the IP address and forward packets to the targetsare called routers. Target machines send and acknowledgment to theoriginator upon the arrival of the packet. In this way TCP guaranteesthe arrival of the packet without alteration, but the time todestination and path to destination is not fixed and can not beestimated. So TCP is designed for an error free communication which arenot sensitive to the time delay and does not require synchronizedoperation.Even when path to destination is unique, each routers on the way to thetarget checks the packet for errors. If an error is detected the packetis discarded and the originator is informed to resent. Obviously theprocessing of the each packet. in routers takes lime, as the networkbecomes larger with increasing number of routers time delays add up to10 seconds. So using classical TCP/IP routing it is impossible to ensurequality of service between two points. But it is important to note thatthis is not: a bug, it is an intended feature of the TCP/IP routing.