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Mission |
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Two trends have combined to make the present moment a historic crossroads in the development of network infrastructure. First, the Internet has had a huge impact on society --- in under 10 years turning a home data connection from an oddity to a must-have with a modem connection or better present in 50% of American homes. The importance and value of a home data connection has been firmly established. Second, communications companies across the U.S. and the world are building high-speed fiber networks closer and closer to customer's homes in an effort to capture market share and cut costs by offering new packages of services. It might seem these converging trends would naturally lead to better data access for all Americans, but there are limits to today's networks that have been masked by breakthroughs over the last 30 years. Today's denial-of-service attacks, long outages due to faults and misconfigurations, periods of poor and unpredictable performance, and devastating economic failures, are inseparable from architectural and protocol design decisions. To achieve a network that can serve the nation's needs requires not only capacity scaling, but also rethinking the network's services and basic architectural and protocol building blocks. The 100x100 Project brings together economists, security and networking experts, network operators, and policy specialists to create blueprints for a network that goes beyond today's Internet. Drawing on technology trends and the experience of the past 30 years, these scientists are re-prioritizing the fundamental principles that underlie network design to craft networks that will be ubiquitous in scale, revolutionary in bandwidth, economically self-sustaining, resistant to attack, and tractable to manage. The barriers to the creation of such a network are not simply deployment issues or the cost of the network. Rather, fundamental innovations will be required in the way networks are organized and managed. The project's research philosophy is a three pronged approach: (1) a holistic network architecture designed from first principles, (2) interdisciplinary fundamental research that addresses the design of an economical, robust, secure and scalable 100x100 network, and (3) proof-of-concept network implementations to demonstrate how the network of the future can be built. The results from the project will take several forms. First, the project will develop blueprints for the 100x100 network that can serve as a compass to guide investment in network development, and will be disseminated to government and industry through presentations and partnerships. Second, in preparing the 100x100 blueprints, fundamental research advances will be made in security, economics, protocol design, switch architecture, and network management. These will be disseminated through the research community. Third, the physical testbeds created through the project can be used as a platform for further studies, for example, the development of applications demanding high bandwidth or social science research on the impact of connectivity in the home. Fourth, the software and tools used to design and validate the 100x100 network, particularly the emulation systems, will be used to create new curricula for network education for two- and four-year colleges.
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