Summary form only given, as follows. The Internet is almost 20 years old today (dating from the wide deployment of TCP/IP on the ARPANET in 1983). It is undoubtedly a success, but unarguably still a work in progress. The author makes the case that the Internet is only 0.1% built out today, and could take another 20 years to fully mature. The Internet is at a crossroads today. It will likely continue as the dominant form of computer networking, but whether or not it becomes the dominant network of the future is questionable. Even though the Internet may have more capacity than the telephone network today, it is incapable of carrying toll-quality telephony. The issues and challenges the Internet faces if it is ever to replace the PSTN are discussed.

AURORA is one of five US testbeds charged with exploring applications of, and technologies necessary for, networks operating at gigabit per second or higher bandwidths. The authors provide an overview of the goals and methodologies employed in AURORA and report preliminary results from the first year of research. AURORA is an experiment in collaboration, where government support has spurred interaction among centers of excellence in industry, academia, and government. The emphasis of the AURORA testbed is research into the supporting technologies for gigabit networking. The targets include new software architectures, network abstractions, hardware technologies, and applications. The AURORA testbed will provide a platform in which researchers can explore business and scientific applications of gigabit networks, while evolving the network architecture to meet the needs of these emerging applications.>

The authors present a high-performance self-routing packet switch architecture, called Sunshine, that can support a wide range of services having diverse performance objectives and traffic characteristics. Sunshine is based on Batcher-banyan networks and achieves high performance by utilizing both internal and output queuing techniques within a single architecture. This queuing strategy results in an extremely robust and efficient architecture suitable for a wide range of services. An enhanced architecture allowing the bandwidth from an arbitrary set of transmission links to be aggregated into trunk groups to create high bandwidth pipes is also presented. Trunk groups appear as a single logical port on the switch and can be used to increase the efficiency of the switch in an extremely bursty environment or to increase the access bandwidth for selected high-bandwidth terminations. Simulation results are presented.>

The packet experimental communications system (packet XCS) is a new experimental voice and data switch. It uses a local-area network (LAN) for digital voice transmission, with local intelligence for switching. The packet XCS also has highly distributed control. The individual sites cooperate to provide user services as well as internal data management. We have learned that several local networks, including CSMA/CD networks, can be made to work well for voice transmission and that highly distributed control is practical in such a system. A system has been constructed which is used as a testbed for distributed voice and data communications experiments. This system is purely for experimentation and does not indicate a direction for future Bell System product offerings.

The real-zero-crossings of a speech signal are developed as the basis for estimating the pitch period of voiced speech. The speech signal is pre-processed by a small, special-purpose system which establishes thresholds for rejection of silent periods and produces measurements of the time interval between real-zeros of the signal. These measurements allow a reduction of computational complexity which permits an autocorrelation estimate of pitch and voiced-unvoiced decisions to be made in near real-time using a mini-computer. The pitch estimates are shown to be robust.