next generation Internet (NGI)

Next Generation Internet (NGI) is a U.S. government initiative launched in the mid-1990s and involving several U.S. national institutes and research institutions. The goal of these activities is to significantly increase performance by using high-speed backbones so that real-time services for voice and video can be used over the Internet in addition to pure data transmission.

While maintaining the TCP/ IP transport protocol, Sonet-basedoptical networks provide transmission speeds in the gigabit range. In addition, IP convergence, IP routing and broadband access are the distinctive features of the Next Generation Internet. The NGI initiative integrates existing high-speed networks into the network concept, according to the NSFnet of the National Science Foundation (NSF), and also targets users with high-speed mass data transmissions, from science and research with the high transmission rate.

A completely new approach to a Next Generation Internet exists with the U.S. initiative Global Environment for Network Innovations( GENI), which was launched by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The two European research initiatives are said to have similar objectives: Experimental Next Generation Internet in Europe (ENGINE) and Gèant2.