Clean Slate Program

From HandWiki

The Clean Slate Program was an interdisciplinary research program at Stanford University which considered how the Internet could be redesigned with a "clean slate", without the accumulated complexity of existing systems but using the experience gained in their decades of development.[1] Its program director was Nick McKeown.[2][3]

Program outline

Clean Slate was based on the belief that the current Internet has significant deficiencies that need to be solved before it can become a unified global communication infrastructure, and that the Internet's shortcomings will not be resolved by the conventional incremental and backward-compatible style of academic and industrial networking research.[4]

The research program focused on unconventional, bold, and long-term research that tries to break the network's ossification. To this end, the program was characterized by two research questions:[citation needed]

  • "With what we know today, if we were to start again with a clean slate, how would we design a global communications infrastructure?"[citation needed]
  • "How should the Internet look in upcoming 15 years?"[2]

Program coordinators identified five key areas for research:[4]

  1. Network architecture
  2. Heterogeneous applications
  3. Heterogeneous physical-layer technologies
  4. Security
  5. Economics and policy

The Clean Slate Program ceased in January 2012, after spawning four major follow-up projects:[1][5]

  1. Internet Infrastructure: OpenFlow and Software Defined Networking
  2. Mobile Internet: POMI 2020
  3. Mobile Social Networking: MobiSocial
  4. Data Center: Stanford Experimental Data Center Lab

References

External links