NETWORK RESEARCH

From 1987 until April 1995, Merit managed and re-engineered the NSFNET Backbone Service project in partnership with the National Science Foundation, ANS, IBM, MCI, and the State of Michigan. The NSFNET led directly to the growth of the commercial Internet.

Some of the historically significant contributions of Merit’s R & D to the networking community include (i) the development and deployment of the world’s largest public registry of Internet data, Merit RADb, (ii) the leadership role in the GateD Consortium that provided a platform for designing and testing new network routing protocols, and (iii) the pioneering work of distributed dial-in and AAA mechanisms. Other notable past research projects include the Internet Performance Measurement and Analysis (IPMA) project that helped lay the foundation for Internet data collection and statistical analysis (in collaboration with the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) and the National Laboratory for Applied Network Research (NLANR), the Flamingo visualization tools, and the BGPTables Web-based toolset for analysis of routing data.