Impact on Technology
The work performed under this project in transport protocols, performance monitoring and end-to-end performance has had several impacts on the research community.
Within the Internet2 community, the network requirements of the applications developed by this project, specifically the RSV and Immersive Segmentation applications, in part led to the formation of a Bulk Transport working group and influenced the development of an API design for a new transport protocol. This transport protocol, to be implemented in user space over UDP, would incorporate a version of partially reliable transport and have better performance characteristics then TCP by attempting to differentiate congestive loss from non-congestive loss by monitoring changes in connection latency.
Our extensive use of multicast also resulted in several discussions within the Internet2 Multicast working group. In part it demonstrated that monitoring multicast performance in a network should become a standard part of network monitoring. It was also demonstrated that simple multicast beacons did not provide complete information on the state of multicast performance, since it is possible for established multicast groups to continue operation after a network failure that prevents the formation of new groups.
The participation of the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse in this project also resulted in impacts within the WiscNet community (Wisconsin's research and education network). The project's use of multicast resulted in multicast being made an operational priority within the network. The unique performance needs of the applications developed by this project were also used in discussions in planning and soliciting for a new state network backbone.
In addition SPRING as an open source software has opened a technology platform to students, research groups, and developers around the world. In addition to raising awareness of surgical simulation, SPRING's availability has lowered the barrier to incorporating 3D modeling, deformable surface physics, and haptic interaction into projects around the world.
Find out more about SPRING's impact of technology!