Highball: a High Speed, Reserved-Access, Wide Area Network1,2,3

This document describes a network architecture called Highball and a preliminary design for a prototype, wide-area data network designed to operate at speeds of 1 Gbps and beyond. It is intended for applications requiring high speed burst transmissions where some latency between requesting a transmission and granting the request can be anticipated and tolerated. Examples include real-time video and disk-disk transfers, national filestore access, remote sensing and similar applications. The network nodes include an intelligent crossbar switch, but have no buffering capabilities; thus, data must be queued at the end nodes. There are no restrictions on the network topology, link speeds or end-end protocols. The end systems, nodes and links can operate at any speed up to the limits imposed by the physical facilities.