CAIRN is the Collaborative Advanced Inter{Agency,Net} Research Testbed, a nationwide IP network testbed built to support development and testing of next-generation internetworking technologies.
CAIRN brings together researchers from a number of communities. Among these are the traditional IP networkers, mobile and wireless communications folks, middleware developers, security and privacy specialists, and application and content creators.
Building on the success of its predecessor, the DARTnet, the CAIRN structure attempts to build human communities as well as technical capabilties. CAIRN facilities can be used (with luck, simultaneously) to support crash-and-burn experiments, to enable conferencing, presentations, and shared workspaces among project participants, and to allow the members of a research group to both join into and isolate themselves from the larger community, as required by their work.
CAIRN is supported by a number of agencies within the United States government, lead by DARPA.
Sometime soon we'll add a useful set of links about CAIRN to this page...
Here at MIT, the Advanced Network Architecture Group is involved with the planning and creation of CAIRN.
You can read an early (March, 1995)
paper
(just
right now, sorry) proposing a
technical and organizational structure for the testbed.
View a slide show about our Virtual Network proposal for managing CAIRN resources among the many participating groups.
Or find out about our Fast PC Routers, a basic building block of the CAIRN infrastructure.
In between building tools we try to do some research, which has kept us from updating our main web pages as much as we ought to...