Highball: a High Speed, Reserved-Access, Wide Area Network

In the 1990 report Highball: a High Speed, Reserved-Access, Wide Area Network, David L. Mills 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 presents an overview of an initial design approach and is intended as a benchmark upon which a detailed design can be developed. It describes the network architecture and proposed access protocols, as well as functional descriptions of the hardware and software components that could be used in a prototype implementation. It concludes with a discussion of additional issues to be resolved in continuing stages of this project.