NSF Award
0741315
This award funds risk reduction activities for a future, experimental network infrastructure that will allow researchers from diverse disciplines across computer and information science and engineering as well as from economics and the social sciences to escape today's Internet-circumscribed research environment. This infrastructure will allow researchers to program their own unique networks (i.e., multiple end-to-end "slices") that run on federated, heterogeneous backbones and edge networks to try out new protocols (that may or may not be TCP/IP-based), new architectures inspired by recent discoveries in economic game theory or artificial intelligence (that didn't exist when the Internet was first imagined), and/or new cross-layer research whereby functionalities that incorporate human values, such as information privacy or security, for example, become integral parts of the network architecture as opposed to an afterthought. The intention is for this infrastructure to be deeply instrumented so that researchers will be able to monitor their ongoing experiments, collect data on the use of novel protocols, designs and architectures, and analyze the emergent behaviors of traffic. Major outcomes from this project include 1) identification and reduction of technical risks, and 2) broadening and strengthening community participation in planning the experimental network infrastructure. Significant outreach activities will include the widest possible array of research and education communities in dialogue about the scope and scale of research on such an infrastructure, which promises to deepen their participation in the design process and helps to ensure that the future infrastructure meets their needs.
