Researchers aim to revamp 'ossified' Internet

So if you had to design the Internet from the ground up what would you make it look like? That's what's on the table at Stanford University where researchers this month will launch a new program called the Clean Slate Design for the Internet.

"How should the Internet look in 15 years?" asks Nick McKeown, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science who is leading the effort in a statement. "We should be able to answer that question by saying we created exactly what we need, not just that we patched some more holes, made some new tweaks or came up with some more work-arounds. Let's invent the car instead of giving the same horse better hay.

"The point of Stanford's efforts is not that the Internet is broken they say, just that it has become ossified in the face of emerging security threats and novel applications, researchers said.

Cisco Systems, Deutsche Telekom and NEC are also taking part in the research. The researchers say their work closely complements two projects under way at the National Science Foundation. The first, called GENI, for Global Environment for Network Innovations, aims to build a nationwide programmable platform for research in network architectures. Then there's FIND, or the Future Internet Network Design, aims to develop new Internet architectures. McKeown and his colleagues already have identified and begun working on four projects that constitute the initial research direction of the program.

Here's a look at them:

ETHANE: A prime example is a prototype 400-user wireless network in the Gates Computer Science Building called Ethane. According to the University's Web site Ethane is a backwards compatible Network Access Control architecture for enterprise networks. In the Ethane approach, simple-to-define access policies are maintained in one place, and implemented consistently along a network datapath, and no user, switch or end-host has more information than it absolutely needs. Normal corporate networks allow open communication by default, which makes implementing effective security and privacy rules an onerous task for network administrators. Much simpler is Ethane, which starts out prohibiting all communications. Administrators then simply open whatever channels are appropriate within an organization while security is retained by default. "Ethane is a strict way of controlling who can talk to whom and over what path they can communicate," McKeown says.

LIGHTFLOW: According to the Website, LightFlow- a fast, dynamic circuit switched transport for the Internet core. Researchers envision a flexible transport architecture optimized for carrying IP traffic, where the access routers are directly connected via a switched optical core to other access routers. "We propose a core where the backbone routers are eliminated and lightweight circuits are setup and torn down with the help of a lightweight control plane (GMPLS lite!) and a flexible transport layer of meshed optical switches. In this project, we shall seek to answer several questions regarding the usage model, both in terms of the access router functionality and the transport layer architecture, in our goal to achieve a simple, elegant, flexible and cost-effective future Internet backbone." Lightflow aims to replace big routers in the backbone with high-efficiency optical switches that would be more flexible and responsive to the demands of the routers at the edge. This would allow Internet service providers to get the bandwidth they need exactly when their users need it.

The optical switches are about 10 times cheaper, use 10 times less power and have 10 times the capacity of electronic routers, so using them could cut the cost and power consumption of communications while increasing capacity. But so far no one has been able to develop effective ways to make this happen, McKeown says. Much of the research will focus on developing effective protocols to make such an overhaul feasible.

WIRELESS DEVICES: this project addresses the mismatch between the availability of wireless network capacity and the huge growth in the use of wireless devices to access the Internet. Researchers are looking at ways to give wireless devices, such as personal digital assistants, phones and other handheld devices the flexibility to find and access pockets of unused spectrum when they need it.

MODELING: this project aims to improve theoretical research models of the Internet to allow for better understanding of the network at larger scales than simulations can handle.

The Clean Slate For the Internet Web site says: 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.

The researchers will present their ideas March 21 during a daylong workshop at the annual meeting of the Stanford Computer Forum.