Nobody’s going to tear down the Internet and rebuild it from scratch, but academics at Stanford University are imagining what the new blueprint would look like if they did and they hope their work will lead to an Internet that works better in 20 years than it does today. So far the program, called Clean Slate Design for the Internet, has narrowed down what it considers four key problems that need to be addressed: establishing a sustainable economic model for the providers that own the Internet infrastructure; establishing a trust mechanism so people can know with certainty where traffic comes from; upgrading mobility from an annoying special case that isn’t handled well to a mainstream access mode; and improving performance. Clean Slate participants, who include representatives from networking vendors and service providers, met last week to discuss their progress. Network World Senior Editor Tim Greene talked to the leader of the effort, Associate Professor Nick McKeown, about how the project is going.
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