Research Issues

• Assess the feasibility of broadband transmission systems for access by local off/on campus users. To determine the tradeoffs between speed, access time and number of users.

• To evaluate the performance of the DQDB local network with data transmission rates from 155 Mb/s to 620 Mb/s.

• To evaluate the tradeoff between computational effort, storage and bandwidth of the delivery system. To determine the threshold at which compression becomes advantageous.

• To model the relationships between processing speed and transmission system bandwidth is needed to provide 1 second response time for a workload of 100 local/remote concurrent users. To gauge the effect of the degree of parallelism needed to serve a given user mix.

• Identify the core services (catalogue access, user-interface, remote site services) to support query/retrieval in a digital library. Specify the functional characteristics of the Servers and their interfaces.

• To formulate protocols for site transparency, i.e. to make all databases appear local to users.

• To evaluate the performance of the system when part of the catalogue of a remote site is locally resident. To determine whether or not a local cache would improve the access time.

• To create a system's environment to facilitate direct transmission of images and some text data from publishers to a digital library.

• Development of an authentication mechanism to assure the identity of remote users.

• Analyze existing protocols and designing new protocols for assuring the security, privacy and integrity of the data on the network.

• To implement authentication to be able to guarantee the integrity of any accounting functions.