The NASA Research and Engineering Network (NREN) is a nationwide

wide area network A wide area network (WAN) is a telecommunications network that extends over a large geographic area. Wide area networks are often established with leased telecommunication circuits. Businesses, as well as schools and government entities, u ...

which connects selected

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil space program, aeronautics research, and space research. NASA was established in 1958, succeedi ...

centers and peers with other high-performance network test-beds. It enables NASA scientists, engineers, and researchers to reach their partners within other federal agencies and academia. The NREN NASA Research and Education Network FY 97 Annual Report
/ref> was initially developed in 1996 enabling: * Aerospace engineers to revolutionize air travel by remotely controlling wind tunnels on their desktops, * astronauts and engineers to train together in realistic simulations of space flight, * medical researchers to safely monitor and treat humans in space from the Earth, * Earth scientists from all over the country to develop climate models that allow us to predict and respond to environmental events such as floods, and * space scientists to chart the evolution of the universe. NASA led the creation of the Next Generation Internet - as the lead organizer of the NGI Implementation Plan NGI Implementation Plan
/ref> NREN pioneered three initial NGI Exchanges (NGIXs) with its interagency partners. NREN NGI Interconnects

Since its creation NREN has been upgraded several times. It currently has 10 Gigabits-per-second (Gbit/s) connectivity across the continental United States, primarily to link to the Columbia supercomputer at the

NASA Ames Research Center The Ames Research Center (ARC), also known as NASA Ames, is a major NASA research center at Moffett Federal Airfield in California's Silicon Valley. It was founded in 1939 as the second National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) labora ...

Moffett Field, California Moffett Federal Airfield , also known as Moffett Field, is a joint civil-military airport located in an unincorporated part of Santa Clara County, California, United States, between northern Mountain View and northern Sunnyvale. On November 10, ...

.NASA Research & Engineering Network — About
/ref> In March 2006, NREN developed and implemented a custom wireless networking protocol known as Dynamic Source Routing (DSR). DSR was to be used by field teams and robots to facilitate communication in difficult field conditions. In September 2006 the NREN was used to develop a high transfer rate application called BBFTP to support GOES 5 operations between Ames and

Goddard Space Flight Center The Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) is a major NASA space research laboratory located approximately northeast of Washington, D.C. in Greenbelt, Maryland, United States. Established on May 1, 1959 as NASA's first space flight center, GSFC emp ...

(GSFC). BBFTP achieved transfer rates as high as 52

Megabytes The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Its recommended unit symbol is MB. The unit prefix ''mega'' is a multiplier of (106) in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one megabyte is one million bytes ...

/sec, and a net transfer of well over 4

terabyte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...

s worth of data.NASA Research & Engineering Network
/ref> The NREN supported operations of the

McGill High Arctic Research Station McGill is a surname of Scottish and Irish origin, from which the names of many places and organizations are derived. It may refer to: People * McGill (surname) (including a list of individuals with the surname) * McGill family (Monrovia), a prom ...

(MARS).McGill High Arctic Research Station (MARS) Status Report
/ref>

References

{{USGovernment, archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/19980612035852/http://www.nren.nasa.gov/about.html, archive-date=1998-06-12, url=http://www.nren.nasa.gov/about.html, title=Research and Engineering Network, agency=National Aeronautics and Space Administration Wide area networks NASA online Goddard Space Flight Center Ames Research Center

See also

References