Workshop: Spring 2013 Future Internet Architecture investigator meeting

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports a Future Internet Architecture (FIA) principal investigator (PI) meeting in March 2013. The PIs will discuss two topics; the first is of possible environments in which each of the NSF-funded projects might be deployed and demonstrated. The funded projects are expected to produce a running prototype that can be used to gain operational experience with the ideas as they are reduced to practice. This meeting will bring together the investigators from the various projects and experts representing various possible demonstration environments. The second topic of the workshop is the challenge of evaluation of proposed architectures. The meeting will include a series of discussions around different aspects of architecture evaluation, as the projects position themselves to evaluate their designs. Intellectual Merit: The discussions of demonstration environments, which will bring together outside experts and project leadership, will contribute to a shared understanding of the problems and issues that various user communities face as they incorporate networking technology into their domains. The discussions of evaluation will lay the groundwork for a methodical study of the question as to how to evaluate architectural proposals and argue that one or another design is 'better', or more fit for purpose. The field of computer science today has no agreed method or approach to the evaluation of design proposals in a complex, multi-dimensional requirement space. Broader Impacts: The broader goal of the NSF FIA effort is enhancing the relevance and impact of the NSF-funded network research, intellectual enrichment of the network research community, and the contribution of new concepts and thought leadership to the future of the Internet. The FIA effort, and the workshops in particular, are a means to train a cohort of academic network researchers in the practice of long-range architectural thinking. The program has the potential to contribute to a future Internet that is materially more secure, robust, economically viable, and fit for the needs of society than the Internet of today. The results of this workshop, which will be posted on the FIA website for public dissemination, will be a contribution to this broader goal.