NSF Award
0714770
The major objective of GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovation), a virtual laboratory for exploring future internets at scale, is to create major new opportunities to understand, innovate and transform global networks and their interactions with society. Dynamic and adaptive, GENI opens up new areas of research at the frontiers of network science and engineering, and increases the opportunity for significant socio-economic impact. <br/><br/>GENI will employ a flexible and adaptable framework that incorporates spiral development, i.e., iterative prototyping, and federation, i.e., connecting heterogeneous networks, substrates and technologies. It is expected that each turn of the spiral will take advantage of what currently exists, what has been learned from the previous spiral, what can fruitfully be federated and what might be achieved through new development and prototyping activities. Spiral 1 will allow academic-industry partners to create end-to-end GENI prototypes with a strong emphasis on the design and implementation of multiple GENI control frameworks. The ultimate goal is to design end-to-end prototypes of a virtual laboratory with a suite of infrastructure that will support future experiments and research challenges articulated by the Network Science and Engineering (NetSE) research community.<br/><br/>Intellectual Merit: This award gives funding to BBN Technologies to provide management and oversight of all GENI-related activities. GENI will 1) support at-scale experimentation on shared, heterogeneous, highly-instrumented infrastructure, 2) enable deep programmability throughout the network, promoting innovations in network science, technologies, services and applications, and 3) provide collaborative and exploratory environments for academia, industry, and the public to catalyze groundbreaking discoveries and innovation.<br/><br/>Broader Impact: Encouraging community engagement is critical to success. A GENI outreach plan will be developed and implemented. Each year, three GENI Engineering Conferences will be held. Open application for travel grants will ensure that researchers and students at underserved academic institutions and regions of the country will be able to participate. Potential partners in industry and international funding agencies will also be encouraged to attend. Students and young faculty will be hired as interns at BBN. As needed, interdisciplinary workshops will be convened that bring together researchers that don?t normally communicate, but from which GENI and the research community can benefit. <br/><br/>There is no pre-ordained outcome for these activities; the resultant GENI infrastructure suite could be an enahanced Internet, enhanced testbeds, federations of enhanced testbeds, something brand new (from small to large), federation of all of the above and/or federation with related international efforts. The goal is to promote innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic growth.
