Xunet 2: A Nationwide Testbed in High Speed Networking

Xunet 2 is an experimental wide-area network that serves as a testbed for research on data communications techniques. The initial focus is data communications between FDDI local area networks using a Broadband ISDN style backbone network. The network will initially have connections to AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill and to three universities: the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. This paper provides an overview of the architecture of the Xunet 2 testbed.