Glossary
 
Access Layer - the access layer is the point at which local end users are allowed into the network. This layer may also use access lists or filters to further optimize the needs of a particular set of users. In the campus environment, access-layer functions can include the following:
 Shared bandwidth
 Switched bandwidth
 MAC layer filtering
 Microsegmentation
 
In the non-campus environment, the access layer can give remote sites access to the corporate network via some wide-area technology, such as Frame Relay, ISDN, or leased lines.
 
ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) - a high speed, low delay, multiplexing and switching technology that supports any type of user traffic, such as voice, data and video applications. ATM uses small, fixed length units called cells. Each cell is identified with virtual circuit identifiers that are contained in the cell header. These identifiers are used to relay the traffic through high-speed switches. ATM is media independent operating over wire or optical fiber and supports multimedia applications at multi megabit transfer rates.
 
Authentication - the process of establishing whether or not a real-world subject is who or what its identifier indicates. Identity can be proven by:
 Something you know, like a password
 Something you have, as with smartcards, challenge-response mechanisms, or public-key certificates
 Something you are, as with positive photo identification, fingerprints, and biometrics
 
Authorization - the read/write/execute controls that are embedded in file systems. Typically, authorization indicates what an identifier, properly authenticated, is permitted to do with a networked object or resource.
 
BICSI - an international non-profit professional association serving the telecommunications premise wiring industry. BICSI promotes the economical and efficient design and implementation of telecommunications distribution systems in commercial and multi-family buildings. To this end, BICSI offers courses, publications, conferences and registration programs.
 
See http://www.jhu.edu/~hac_ns (click on cabling infrastructure standards) or http://jhmcis.med.jhu.edu (click on network protocol and cabling infrastructure standards) for Hopkins cabling infrastructure standards.
 
Bandwidth - the measure of the capacity of a communications channel first used in the early RF days to measure how much of the RF band it would take to carry a given radio signal i.e. a typical mobile radio system for police and fire departments uses 12.5 kHz of bandwidth to transmit voice and data. Later in the copper wire era of telephony it took 3khz to transmit a voice signal. In the digital voice and data world speed of transmission, measured in bits per second, has become more important than bandwidth This is particularly true when discussing fiber optics that transmit light pulses rather than electric waves. Broadband defines the efficient use of a signaling method by imposing multiple transmissions over a given medium. It is not necessarily an indication of speed of a service although broadband services usually are capable of delivering higher speeds. For instance ISDN is a narrow band service that delivers 128Kbs over twisted pair copper. DSL is a broadband service that also delivers 128kbs over twisted pair copper but can deliver higher speeds within a given set of physical parameters Cable television uses broadband transmission techniques.
 
Biometric Device - technology associated with secure identification (authentication) of a user of services that rely upon biological identification of an individual. Finger print and retinal identification are the most common forms of identifiers that are used with this technology.
 
BlueTooth - computing and telecommunications industry specification that describes how mobile phones, computers, and personal digital assistants (PDA's) can easily interconnect with each other and with home and business phones and computers using a short-range wireless connection. Using this technology, users of cellular phones, pagers, and personal digital assistants such as the Palm Pilot will be able to buy a three-in-one phone that can double as a portable phone at home or in the office, get quickly synchronized with information in a desktop or notebook computer, initiate the sending or receiving of a fax, initiate a print-out, and, in general, have all mobile and fixed computer devices be totally coordinated. The technology requires that a low-cost transceiver chip be included in each device. Products with BlueTooth technology are expected to appear in large numbers beginning in 2000.
 
See this page for further exploration of BlueTooth and other technologies supporting the mobile user.
 
Building Industry Consulting Services International (BICSI) - was started by the Reginal Bell Operating Companies (RBOC’s) to provide building wiring consulting services to outside customers and to the RBOCs. After deregulation the service went public as a telecommunication wiring standards organization. Today it is known as BICSI "A Telecommunications Organization". It offers a number of professional wiring standards certification programs and helps to define and develop new wiring standards.
 

 
CDMA - See Code Division Multiple Access.
 
Centrex - a service from local telephone companies in the United States in which up-to-date phone facilities at the phone company's central (local) office are offered to business users so that they don't need to purchase their own facilities. The Centrex service effectively partitions part of its own centralized capabilities among its business customers. The customer is spared the expense of having to keep up with fast-moving technology changes for example, having to continually update their PBX (private branch exchange) software and infrastructure, and the phone company has a new set of services to sell.
 
A number of years ago Centrex service, because of its expense and limited feature set, fell into disfavor with business customers when full featured PBXs became widely available. In recent years however, a better equipped and priced Centrex offering has enabled this service to hold its own in the marketplace.
 
In many cases, Centrex has now replaced the private branch exchange. Effectively, the central office has become a huge branch exchange for all of its local customers. In most cases, Centrex (which is sold by different names in different localities) provides customers with as much if not more control over the services they have than PBX did. In some cases, the phone company places Centrex equipment on the customer premises.
 
Typical Centrex service includes direct inward dialing (DID), sharing of the same system among multiple company locations, and self-managed line allocation and cost accounting monitoring.
 
CERT - (see CSIRT) at Hopkins, the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) has been replaced by Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT) which is a more comprehensive approach.
 
Common Information Model (CIM) - as defined by the Distributed Management Task Force, CIM is a common data model of an implementation-neutral schema for describing overall management information in a network/enterprise environment. CIM is comprised of a Specification and a Schema. The Specification defines the details for integration with other management models (i.e. SNMP's MIBs or the DMTF's MIFs) while the schema provides the actual model descriptions. (See www.dmtf.org.)
 
Circuit Switching - individual telephones (extensions) are connected to a central switch by a pair of wires called a circuit When making a call, the switch decodes the number dialed to identify the target extension and temporarily connects the two circuits together. When the callers hang up, the switch disconnects the circuits. PBXs and Centrex services are based on circuit switching technology.
 
Competitive Local Exchange Carrier (CLEC) - a competitor to local telephone companies that has been granted permission by the state regulatory commission to offer local telephone service. CLEC's compete with the Bell Operating Companies.
 
See this page for information on local loop solutions. See this page, or these pages (one, two or three) for information on wireless solutions.
 
Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) - a wireless RF transmission standard commonly used for cellular telephony. With CDMA, unique digital codes, rather than separate RF frequencies or channels, are used to differentiate subscribers. The codes are shared by both the mobile station (cellular phone) and the base station, and are called "pseudo-Random Code Sequences." All users share the same range of radio spectrum
 
CDMA uses spread spectrum technology to assign the codes to all speech bits, transmits encoded speech and reassembles the speech to its original format. By assigning a unique correlating code to each transmitter, several simultaneous conversations can share the same frequency allocation. .
 
See www.cdg.org for more information on CDMA and other wireless standards. Click on CDMA Technology, click on read more about CDMA, click on what is CDMA technology, click "Current Cellular Standards" for a discussion of digital systems. Click on CDMA Technology for a detailed description of RF digital standards. Click 3g/internet&is, click 3g, click evolution, click tomorrow's needs for a discussion on CDMAone and next generation wireless systems.
 
Core Layer - the core layer is a high-speed switching backbone and should be designed to switch packets as fast as possible. This layer of the network should not perform any packet manipulation, such as access lists and filtering, that would slow down the switching of packets.
 
CSIRT - Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT). Formed within the Hopkins enterprise, the CSIRT team responds to security issues that arise. The response varies dependent upon the seriousness of the event, the risk of further or additional damage, and the type of coordination and notification required.
 
DSL - see Digital Subscriber Line.
 
Directory Enabled Network (DEN) - term used in conjunction with an architecture and grouping of networking capabilities that are developed and driven by a central directory. These capabilities can include Quality of Service, Policy Based Management, security functionality, authentication and authorization services, etc.
 
Digital Subscriber Lines (DSL) - public network technology that delivers high bandwidth over conventional copper wiring at limited distances. There are four types of DSL: ADSL, HDSL, SDSL, and VDSL. Asymmetrical, ADSL, which transmits an asymmetrical data stream with a higher downstream rate to the user and a slower upstream rate from the user to the network. ADSL has a range of downstream data rates that depend on distance from the serving central office. Single-line, SDSL, which provides symmetrical data, rates usually at 768kps for both downstream and upstream transmission. High data rate, HDSL, which requires two twisted-pair lines and operates in a duplex mode at a rate of 1.544MB both downstream and upstream. HDSL is designed primarily for WAN and LAN access. All are provisioned via modem pairs, with one modem located at a central office and the other at the customer site. Because most DSL technologies do not use the whole bandwidth of the twisted pair, there is room remaining for a voice channel.
 
Directory - the operational linchpin of almost all Middleware services. They can contain critical customization information for people, processes, resources and groups. By placing such information in a common storage area, diverse applications from diverse locations can access a consistent and comprehensive source for current values of key data. In future information technology environments, directories will be among the most critical services offered.
 
Dynamic Domain Name Services (DDNS) - Dynamic DNS is a service that associates your current dynamically assigned IP address (assigned by DHCP with a static domain name, allowing you to access your computer remotely, or set up a web, FTP, telnet, mail, or similar server on your machine using the static domain name.
 
Dynamic Host Control Protocol (DHCP) - provides a mechanism for allocating IP addresses dynamically so that addresses can be reused when hosts no longer need them.
 
Distribution Layer - the distribution layer of the network is the demarcation point between the access and core layers and helps to define and differentiate the core. The purpose of this layer is to provide boundary definition and is the place at which packet manipulation can take place. In the campus environment, the distribution layer can include several functions, such as the following:
 Address or area aggregation
 Departmental or workgroup access
 Broadcast/multicast domain definition
 Virtual LAN (vLAN) routing
 Any media transitions that need to occur
 Security
 

 
Electronic Mail (EMAIL) - name associated with various products and services that support the transmission of mail in an electronic form.
 
Extensible Markup Language (XML) - an emerging standard language that can be used to provide data exchange between a wide range of systems. DIR-XML will likely provide data exchange standards between disparate directory systems.
 
Firmware - computer instruction sets provided through hardware (chip) technology.
 
Frame Relay - low-cost packet-switching protocol for connecting devices on a wide area network. Its success is primarily due to a single dominant application in the marketplace: as a replacement for leased lines for interconnecting local area data networks. As a result, about 90% of the traffic carried on frame relay networks has been Internet Protocol (IP) traffic. However many other applications are migrating to frame relay. These applications are no longer simply LAN and IP centric. They include legacy data applications (async,bisync, HDLC, etc.) as well as applications not traditionally thought of as frame services, such as voice, fax, voice-band data, and video conferencing.
 
Global Standard for Mobile Computing (GSM) - Standard for cellular services found widely in Europe and in some other countries, but not in the U.S. and not a truly global standard for cellular service.
 
GroupWise - a groupware product developed by Novell that provide a wide range of collaboration features.
 
See this page for additional details.
 
Hybrid Fiber Coax (HFC) are second generation cable TV infrastructure. HFC networks combine both optical-fiber and coaxial cable lines. Optical fiber runs from the cable head end to neighborhoods of 500 to 2,000 subscribers. Coaxial cable runs from the optical-fiber feeders to each subscriber. Hybrid networks provide many of fiber's reliability and bandwidth benefits at a lower cost than a pure fiber network. With two-way communications, HFC enables cable operators to offer two-way communications, providing subscribers with Internet access, telephone service over the cable as well as full interactive access to broadband signals, including hundreds of channels of interactive TV, digital services, and more. The theoretical size of the cable link is very large-a total of some 735 MHZ usable bandwidth. HFC divides the total bandwidth into a downstream (to the home) band and an upstream (to the hub) band. The downstream band typically occupies 50-750 MHZ, while the upstream band typically occupies from 5-40 MHZ.
 
Internet (Commodity Internet) - the term used to describe the network, originally funded through the National Sciences Foundation, that was designed with the intent of servicing the needs of the research community. Because of its huge success, this network has grown tremendously and now provides connectivity for research, commercial, educational, and general services around the world. Because of its wide use, the lack of guaranteed service levels and current speeds, it is no longer sufficient to meet many of the high bandwidth application requirements of the research arena.
 
I2 (Internet2) - high speed networking infrastructure that includes extremely high bandwidth, management techniques and products that support levels and quality of service. Over 170 U.S. universities, working together with partners in industry and government, are leading the Internet2 project. Internet2 is working to enable applications, such as telemedicine, digital libraries and virtual laboratories that are not possible with the technology underlying today's Internet. As a project of the University Corporation for Advanced Internet Development (UCAID), the Internet2 project is not a single separate network, but rather joins member network application and engineering development efforts together with many advanced, campus, regional, and national networks.
 
See http://www.internet2.edu
 
Identifiers - an identifier is a function that maps real-world subjects into name or character strings, so that distinct subjects have distinct strings. A real-world subject may be a person, an object (i.e.: a printer or a file), a group, or a department. A real-world subject can have multiple identifiers. When campuses seek to interoperate, issues will arise on the type of identifier that needs to be exchanged, and the forms and policies for that identifier. Moreover, to the degree that identifiers enable users to access other forms of electronic credentials, there may need to be agreements and consistency between campuses about the policies associated with classes of identifiers.
 
IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) - Professional organization whose activities include the development of communications and network standards. IEEE LAN standards are the predominant LAN standards today.
 
The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) - the arm of the United Nations that oversees global telecommunications systems, is overseeing worldwide efforts to define third generation wireless standards. These standards, known as International Mobile Telecommunications-2000 (IMT-2000), will provide universal coverage and enable seamless roaming across multiple networks.
 
Internet Service Provider (ISP) - an organization that provides access to the Internet through various connectivity mechanisms (dial modem, cable services, etc.). Some larger providers utilize their own networks for dial access, while many others utilize existing networks and act as an aggregation point for services. ISP's can offer many types of services including secure access and VPN, various connectivity speeds, search capabilities, web pages, etc.
 
Intrusion Detection System (IDS) - combination of hardware and software products that are used to analyze network traffic passing through a single point on the network. The software analyzes the data searching for specific signatures (known patterns of traffic) of malicious intent. More sophisticated systems are capable of taking immediate action to terminate connection, to send an alert to an attendant or to log activity.
 
Internet Protocol (IP) - a protocol adopted by the international community that is the basis for communications across the Internet.
 
Internet Protocol Address (IP Address) - an addressing mechanism that serves to identify devices throughout the world that are connected by the Internet.
 
IPv4 - Internet Protocol version 4, which is the current version of the Internet Protocol that has a 32-bit addressing schema.
 
IPv6 - Internet Protocol version 6 or the next generation Internet protocol. The current version of the Internet Protocol (IP) is becoming obsolete because of its limited address space, lack of needed functionality, and inadequate security features. The next generation of IP, called IPv6, will carry TCP/IP networks and applications well into the next century.
 
IPX - a networking protocol that is commonly used by older versions of Netware. This protocol, while scalable, is less efficient, and is becoming increasingly less supported by makers of networking hardware. In order to deploy a true Directory Enabled Network, IPX will have to be eliminated.
 
Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) - communication protocol, offered by telephone companies, that permits telephone networks to carry data, voice, and other source traffic.
 
Local Area Network (LAN) - terminology used to describe a network connecting devices in a localized area. The emergence of vLAN (virtual LAN) technologies enables a logical connection of devices that are not located solely in one area.
 
See this page for a discussion of wireless LANs by makers of OEM wireless LANs.
 
Local Exchange Carrier (LEC) - any company authorized by the state public utility commission to sell local telephone service. A LEC can be the Regional Bell Operating Company or an independent (e.g. GTE).
 
Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) - a protocol that provides access for management and browser applications that support read/write interactive access to the X.500 compatible directories.
 
Middleware - often referred to as "glue", is a layer of software between the network and the applications. This software provides services such as identification, authentication, authorization, directories, and security. In today's Internet, applications usually have to provide these services themselves, which leads to competing and incompatible standards. By promoting standardization and interoperability, Middleware will make advanced network applications much easier to use.
 
Multicast - single packets copied by the network and sent to a specific subset of network addresses. These addresses are specified in the Destination Address Field
 

 
NDS - Novell Directory Services. This product is the most widely used directory at Johns Hopkins. It provides a full-service directory for a wide range of network platforms including Windows NT, Solaris, Netware, Tru64 and Linux.
 
See www.novell.com/nds for additional details.
 
Net Meeting - a software package from Microsoft that delivers a complete Internet conferencing solution for all Windows users with multi-point data conferencing, text chat, whiteboard, and file transfer, as well as point-to-point audio and video.
 
Next Generation Internet (NGI) - the Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative will create a foundation for more powerful and versatile networks of the 21st century. It will foster partnerships among academia, industry, and Government that will keep the U.S. at the cutting-edge of information and communications technologies. It will accelerate the introduction of new networking services for our businesses, schools, and homes. This initiative is possible because of the very strong Federal agency programs that are currently underway. The Large Scale Networking R&D crosscut for FY 1998, for example, is $288.3 million, which included the $100 million for NGI.
 
NSF - the National Science Foundation funds research and education in science and engineering. It does this through grants, contracts, and cooperative agreements to more than 2,000 colleges, universities and other research and/or education institutions in all parts of the United States. The Foundation accounts for about 20 percent of federal support to academic institutions for basic research.
 
Private Branch Exchange (PBX) - a private telephone system, typically owned and used by a business. In many businesses, workers need telephones to communicate among themselves and to communicate with customers and suppliers. However, since only 10 to 20 percent (depending on the business) are talking with people outside their company at any one time, it doesn't make sense to give each a dedicated connection to the PSTN. A PBX allows the workers to share the few incoming lines required to support their business and to communicate on premise without using the PSTN.
 
See these pages (one, two) for more information concerning carrier based IP switches.
 
Point of Presence (POP) - physical locations that serve as aggregation and connection points for networking related equipment and services. The term POP is frequently used in conjunction with a connection point for local and long distance carriers, but is also applied to connection points internal services.
 
Policy Management - the management of a network so that various kinds of traffic - data, voice, and video - get the priority of availability and bandwidth needed to serve the network's users effectively. With the convergence of data, telephone, and video traffic in the same network, companies will be challenged to manage traffic so that one kind of service doesn't preempt another kind. Using policy statements, network administrators can specify which kinds of service to give priority at what times of day on what parts of their Internet Protocol (IP)-based network. This kind of management is often known as Quality of Service (QoS) and is controlled using policy-based network software.
 
PKI - Public Key Infrastructure - software, protocols and legal agreements that are necessary to effectively use digital certificates combine to form a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). A PKI has several components.
 A Certificate Authority (CA), that manages and signs digital certificates for an institution
 Registration Authorities, operating under the auspices of the CA, that validate users as having been issued certificates
 PKI management tools, including software to manage revocations, validations and renewals
 Directories to store certificates, public keys, and certificate management information
 Databases and key-management software to store escrowed and archived keys
 Applications that can make use of certificates and can seek validation of others' certificates
 Trust models that extend the realm of secure communications beyond the original CA
 Policies that identify how an institution manages certificates, including legal liabilities and limitations, standards on contents of certificates, and actual campus practices
 
PSTN - the public switched network owned by the local exchange carriers and the inter-exchange carriers.
 
Quality of Service (QoS) - Measure of performance for a transmission system that reflects its transmission quality and service availability.
 

 
Radio Frequency (RF) - generic term referring to frequencies that correspond to radio transmissions. Generally, this type of communications meets both low and high speed networking requirements in support of both the LAN and WAN environments. Higher speeds that support connectivity outside of a single building require a FCC license, while lower speeds generally operate only for limited distances and do not require a separate FCC license.
 
See this page for a definition of LMDS multi point service and this page for a visual demonstration of point-to-point connectivity.
 
Non-licenced Radio Frequencies for Data - wireless LANs are typically designed to operate in portions of the radio spectrum where the FCC does not require the end-user to purchase license to use the airwaves. In the U.S. most wireless LANs broadcast over one of the ISM (Instrumentation, Scientific, and Medical) bands. These include 902-928 MHZ, 2.4-2.483 GHz, 5.15-5.35 GHz, and 5.725-5.875 GHz. Licensed data networks , usually point to point or point to multipoint run at 2.5-2.7 GHz and 28-31GHz
 
Router - network layer device that uses one or more metrics to determine the optimal path along which network traffic should be forwarded. Routers forward packets from one network to another based on network layer information. Occasionally called a gateway (although this definition of gateway is becoming increasingly outdated).
 
Routing - process of finding a path to a destination host. Routing is very complex in large networks because of the many potential intermediate destinations a packet might traverse before reaching its destination host.
 
Routing devices - devices with intelligence that connect parts of local and remote networks together. Because routing tables are used to look up addresses for each message, routers introduce delay into networks. Routers provide network management capabilities such as load balancing, partitioning of the network, use statistics, communication priority, and troubleshooting tools that allow for the detection and correction of problems even in complex networks.
 
Routing Metric - method by which a routing algorithm determines that one route is better than another. This information is stored in routing tables. Metrics include bandwidth, communication cost, delay, hop count, load, MTU, path cost, and reliability. Sometimes referred to simply as a metric.
 
Routing Protocol - protocol that accomplishes routing through the implementation of a specific routing algorithm. Examples of routing protocols include IGRP, OSPF, and RIP.
 
Synchronous Optical Network (SONET) - a standard for optical transport that defines optical carrier levels and their electrically equivalent synchronous transport signals. SONET allows for a multi-vendor environment and positions the network for transport of new services, synchronous networking, and enhanced operations, administration and maintenance.

Spread Spectrum Technology - predominant wireless LAN system found prior to 2000 that utilizes spread-spectrum technology, a wide band radio frequency technique developed by the military for use in reliable, secure, mission-critical communications systems. Spread-spectrum is designed to trade off bandwidth efficiency for reliability, integrity and security. In other words, more bandwidth is consumed than in the case of narrowband transmission, but the tradeoff produces a signal that is, in effect, louder and thus easier to detect, provided that the receiver knows the parameters of the spread-spectrum signal being broadcast. If a receiver is not tuned to the right frequency, a spread-spectrum signal appears to be background noise. There are two types of spread spectrum radio: frequency hopping and direct sequence.

• Frequency-hopping spread-spectrum (FHSS) uses a narrowband carrier that changes frequency in a pattern known to both transmitter and receiver. Properly synchronized, the net effect is to maintain a single logical channel. To an unintended receiver, FHSS appears to be short-duration impulse noise.
   
  
• Direct-sequence spread-spectrum (DSSS) generates a redundant bit pattern for each bit to be transmitted. This bit pattern is called a chip (or chipping code). The longer the chip, the greater the probability that the original data can be recovered (and, of course, the more bandwidth required). Even if one or more bits in the chip are damaged during transmission, statistical techniques embedded in the radio can recover the original data without the need for retransmission. To an unintended receiver, DSSS appears as low-power wide band noise and is rejected (ignored) by most narrowband receivers.
  

Switched Multi-megabit Data Service (SMDS) - non-dedicated, shared connectivity options provided by local carriers that support mid-range connection speeds.
 
Switching devices/technologies - high-speed network device(s) that forwards packets between network segments. Most LAN switches forward traffic based on MAC addresses. This variety of LAN switch is sometimes called a frame switch. LAN switches are often categorized according to the method they use to forward traffic: cut-through packet switching or store-and-forward packet switching. Multi-layer switches are an intelligent subset of LAN switches. A switch may also include the function of a router, a device or program that can determine the route and specifically what adjacent network point the data should be sent to. In general, a switch is a simpler and faster mechanism than a router, which requires knowledge about the network and how to determine the route.
 

 
T1 - a high-speed (1.544 megabits per second) digital communication circuit, the equivalent of 24 individual 64Kbps channels multiplexed together. A T1 can be used to transmit voice or data, and many are used to provide connections to the Internet. Also known as a DS1 or Digital Signal 1.
 
Text to Speech (TTS) - a software engine that converts written text to speech, the driver behind true Unified Messaging that will enable users to retrieve and to respond to e-mail and faxes from any telephone anywhere in the world.
 
Unified Messaging - delivery of various forms of messaging data to a single device. Unified Messaging frequently include delivery of all of a portion of the following services: phone service, voice mail, Email, calendar, paging and fax messages.
 
Virtual Local Area Network (vLAN) - group of devices on one or more LAN's that are configured (using management software) so that they can communicate as if they were attached to the same wire, when in fact they are located on a number of different LAN segments. Because vLAN's are based on logical instead of physical connections, they are extremely flexible.
 
Virtual Private Network (VPN) - enables IP traffic to travel securely over a public TCP/IP network by encrypting all traffic from one network to another. A VPN uses "tunneling" to encrypt all information at the IP level.
 
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) - technology that employees the IP protocol by telecommunications vendors and service providers in order to transmit voice messages over standard IP based transmission services.
 
Wide Area Network (WAN) - terminology used to describe the networking and associated facilities that connect major campus nodes.
 
Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) - a set of standards for the presentation and delivery of wireless information and telephone services on mobile phones and Personal Directory Assistants.
 
A white paper describing this standard may be found here.
 
Wireless Markup Language - (WML) a language that began to be developed during 1999 to address the limitations caused by the size of hand held devices to input and receive information.
 
Additional information concerning WML can be found in a PCWeek article.
Additional information concerning WML, WMLScript and WAP is available at the Option Technical site.
Information on the iPlanet product is available here.
 
X.500 - a CCITT and ISO combination of standards for providing directory services. X.500 Directory Service is a standard way to develop an electronic directory of people in an organization so that it can be part of a global directory available to anyone in the world with Internet access. Such a directory is sometimes called a global White Pages directory. The idea is to be able to look up people in a user-friendly way by name, department, or organization. Many enterprises and institutions have created an X.500 directory. Because these directories are organized as part of a single global directory, you can search for hundreds of thousands of people from a single place on the World Wide Web.
 
The X.500 directory is organized under a common "root" directory in a "tree" hierarchy of: country, organization, organizational unit, and person. An entry at each of these levels must have certain attributes; some can have optional ones established locally. Each organization can implement a directory in its own way as long as it adheres to the basic schema or plan. The distributed global directory works through a registration process and one or more central places that manage many directories.
 
X.509 - the authentication framework designed to support X.500 directory services. Both X.509 and X.500 are part of the X series of international standards proposed by the ISO and ITU. The X.500 standard is designed to provide directory services on large computer networks. X.509 provides a PKI framework for authenticating X.500 services.
 
XML - see Extensible Markup Language