Collaborative Proposal: Infrastructure for Experimental Network Architecture Research

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The Internet is one of the great technology success stories of the twentieth century, enabling greater access to information and providing new modes of communication among people and organizations. Unfortunately, the Internet's very success is now creating obstacles to innovation in the networking technology that lies at its core. In order to free the global communications infrastructure from stagnation, the nation must find ways to enable its continuing renewal. This planning project is aimed at creating a blueprint for a global experimental infrastructure needed to support a research program in network architectures and distributed systems. The goal of the research program combined with experimental infrastructure is to greatly increase the functional capabilities, robustness, flexibility, and heterogeneity of the global communications network in the face of modern application requirements, and a rich, competitive commercial environment. The key is to re-architect or re-invent the Internet to be more evolvable-to enable the research community to address the key challenges facing the Internet, and in the process, to build an Internet that is worthy of our society's trust. Re-architecting the Internet would require substantial experimental infrastructure. The PIs propose to write a comprehensive plan to build this infrastructure. The proposal identifies the major architectural initiatives that address the challenges facing the Internet, outlines the empirical research process the community will use to pursue these initiatives, describes the experimental infrastructure needed to support this research, and highlights the process of putting in place a management structure for the large infrastructure.