Design of a communications network subsystem for the Unidata project

`Unidata¿ is a project whose goals are to provide discipline oriented workstation facilities for research and teaching in the atmospheric sciences. Access is required to a wide range of computational and atmospheric data resources. The latter include both archive data collections, and current data from a variety of sources which must be delivered in near real time. Central to the architecture of the network is the use of local area networks, in order to provide both configurable systems to meet local requirements and unified access to the several long-haul communications segments of which the network will be composed.