GENI To Replace Internet, Gets $12M Funding

Postglobalism writes "A massive project to redesign and rebuild the Internet from scratch is inching along with $12 million in government funding and donations of network capacity by two major research organizations. Many researchers want to rethink the Internet's underlying architecture, saying a 'clean-slate' approach is the only way to truly address security and other challenges that have cropped up since the Internet's birth in 1969."

Comments

Oh boy! OSI 2.0!

[argent]

Web 2.0 isn't good enough, let's have OSI 2.0! Love them X.400 email addresses, wot?

Won't ever happen

[dlgeek]

First off, once you read past the sensationalist headlines, the article just says that they are establishing a very high capacity research network to study new protocols, not trying to create a parallel infrastructure. However, that being said, trying to redesign the Internet's protocols from scratch isn't necessarily a bad idea, the current model is definitely showing its age. For example, TCP has a lot of issues on links with large bandwidth-delay products, resulting in lots of extensions and forks to support these links.

The real problem is getting a critical mass to switch. Just look at the state of IPv6 support in home networking gear and the lack of implementation all over the web. My guess is that this will lead to some new standards that will maybe be used by people doing experiments with tons of data and nobody else. Don't expect to see this work coming to a router near you.

Re:Won't ever happen

[dlgeek]

The grant is from the NSF, not the DoD which implies it is more scientific in nature.

However, even if it was from the DoD or NSA, the government has a strong interest in improving US users' security, so as to protect US companies from foreign espionage. Look at the NSA's contribution to various crypto algorithms (agreed upon by the security community as positive) or to SELinux.

Re:Translation:

[PlatyPaul]

...which already exists.

Re:But but...

[JasterBobaMereel]

DecNET - Never part of the Internet
Banyan Vines - Never part of the Internet
uunet - Company is now part of Verizon
gopher - replaced by http
telnet - used it this morning ....

Settle down, Beavis

[Spasemunki]

The headline this was posted with is weapons-grade stupid. Nowhere in the GENI plans (which have been being formulated by academics over the last several years) is there any indication that GENI should "replace" the current Internet. There are a few people involved in GENI who think that the Internet of the future might look a bit like GENI in some respects, but a much more likely outcome is that future Internet innovations will emerge from experiments carried out with GENI. GENI will be a very sophisticated research platform that allows researchers to carve up the research network into reasonably isolated slices via virtualization so that experiments into new protocols, switch architectures, etc. can be run on a full-speed network in parallel with one another without interfering. Access to GENI, much like Internet2, will essentially be restricted to researchers running experiments and essentially limited to interconnects between major research universities.

Nowhere is there any suggestion that GENI will or should:
* replace the existing internet
* develop protocols to remove anonymity from the internet
* give control of the internet to any particular government

It's a research platform for academics who think that the field of networking could benefit from large-scale research projects that are more ambitious and forward-looking than the sort of thing that can be reasonably carried out by the R&D departments of large tech corporations. Full stop. There is a ton of information available about the project from their websites, and in papers that have been published over the last several years.