Twenty-first century networking: beyond bits and packets

Abstract

The National Science Foundation is currently challenging the computer and information systems research community to replace the Internet with technology that meets the needs of the present century. The GENI initiative will create an experimental facility for moving ideas toward practical solutions. For the initiative to succeed, the research community needs to come up with new ideas that can be verified or disproved by experiments on a large-scale network. Our principal contribution to twentieth-century networks was technology for moving ones and zeros (packaged in protocol data units)áfrom source to destination. Layered protocols isolate the ones and zeros from other properties of the information conveyed. This talk questions bits as the universal currency of information. It asks the research community to take a top down look at information networks and establish the conceptual foundation of future information systems.