EAGER: Exploring the Transformative Potential of "GENI-enabled" Campuses

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The Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) is a novel suite of infrastructure now being designed and prototyped to support experimental research in network science and engineering. This new infrastructure challenges us to understand and rethink networks broadly and at several layers of abstraction; from the physical substrates through the architecture and protocols to the networks of people, organizations and societies. GENI experimental research will range from network and distributed system design to the theoretical underpinnings of network science, network policy and economics, societal values and the dynamic interactions of the physical, social and virtual spheres in communication networks. Such research holds great promise for new knowledge about the structure, behavior, and dynamics of our most complex systems ? networks of networks ? with potentially huge social and economic impact.While planning has been ongoing for a number of years, a meso-scale national deployment has just begun. One critical, immediate goal is to GENI-enable a number of college and university campuses across the US. These campus-wide GENI deployments are still in the very earliest stages of exploration. Yet, there is high utility in opening up these campuses for experimentation now. A recent workshop at Princeton resulted in about a dozen research teams ready to deploy their experiments on GENI. This EAGER will allow five campuses ? Georgia Institute of Technology, Indiana University, Rutgers University, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and University of Wisconsin, Madison ? to introduce and debug OpenFlow and WiMAX campus infrastructure so that experimentation can be carried out this fall and winter. The plan is for GENI-enabled campuses to be operated by campus IT staff under the overall direction of the GENI Project Office. This funding will allow for about 2 person-months of staff support per campus. All of the campuses have developed schematics for their campus build-out, have obtained support from the campus CIO, and are ready to deploy. Experimental research into untested and novel ideas at this scale could have very substantial potential pay-offs in terms of opening up a new frontier in computer science research, and might well drive rapid and innovative advances in those research fields that begin to employ the GENI suite of infrastructure.