April 14, 2007

Clean Slate - the Internet revisited

Interesting project from Stanford University. If you were planning to scrap the current internet and replace it with something that incorporated what we know today and plan more for the future, what would it be like... Check out: Clean Slate
Overview
We believe that the current Internet has significant deficiencies that need to be solved before it can become a unified global communication infrastructure. Further, we believe the Internet's shortcomings will not be resolved by the conventional incremental and 'backward-compatible' style of academic and industrial networking research. The proposed program will focus on unconventional, bold, and long-term research that tries to break the network's ossification. To this end, the research program can be characterized by two research questions: "With what we know today, if we were to start again with a clean slate, how would we design a global communications infrastructure?", and "How should the Internet look in 15 years?" We will measure our success in the long-term: We intend to look back in 15 years time and see significant impact from our program.

In the spirit of past successful inter-disciplinary research programs at Stanford, the program will be driven by research projects 'from the ground up'. Rather than build a grand infrastructure and tightly coordinated research agenda, we will create a loosely-coupled breeding ground for new ideas. Some projects will be very small, while others will involve multiple researchers; our goal is to be flexible, creating the structure and identifying and focusing funds to support the best research in clean-slate design.

The program will collaborate with, and be funded by, approximately seven industrial partners with interests in networking services, equipment, semiconductors and applications.
Some interesting thoughts in the Whitepaper (PDF) Posted by DaveH at April 14, 2007 6:21 PM
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