Steps beyond international collaborations: Our challenges in Asian Internet Interconnection Initiatives

The Internet has become a critical and dependable communication infrastructure in many countries. In Asia, there is still strong demand for Internet development, because only a limited number of people can use the Internet without difficulties. Asian Internet Interconnection Initiatives (AI3) was established in 1995 by the WIDE Project, aiming at developing technologies for accelerating Internet development in Asia. Since 1995, the project has been constructing its own testbed network using satellite communication systems and this is the only international R&D network based on a satellite communication system. Currently this network connects 17 member sites in 10 countries. Throughout our activity, technologies and engineering have been developed such as our infrastructure which uses a Ku band satellite transponder for Internet applications, UDL routing for an asymmetric one way link to maximize available bandwidth from hub station to member sites, and a series of experiments such as challenges for distance education to confirm usability of our technology have been conducted. We are facing new issues raised such as expansion to use terrestrial links and industrialization of our developed technologies for sustainable services. In order to solve these issues, several new activities have been newly launched in our AI3 project. We overview our achievement in the AI3 project, and discuss newly raised issues.