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The GENI facility will be a success if, over the next 10-15 years,
it enables the research community to invent and demonstrate a global
communications network and related services that is qualitatively
better than today's Internet. Exactly how the research will unfold is,
of course, difficult to predict. However, we can anticipate the
following possible outcomes:
Innovative services and applications will be developed and
deployed on the GENI facility, and some of these services will become
mature enough to make the transition to commercial adoption.
The research community will create a new network architecture
that eventually replaces today's architecture. This depends on a
convergence of multiple architectural visions and that our approach
to deployment proves realistic.
We will gain new insights and architectural clarity, which
commercial players will be able to retro-fit into today's network
architecture. In this way, pursuing a clean slate design improves the
odds that today's incremental evolution of the Internet will succeed
in addressing emerging challenges.
The GENI facility, and its support for virtualization and user
opt-in, will itself become a blueprint for the Future Internet. This
allows multiple sub-system architectures and network services to
co-exist, and results in a climate of continual re-invention. This
virtualized network might be realized at many different levels,
including both above and below IP.
These possible outcomes are not necessarily mutually exclusive,
and the list is not meant to be exhaustive.
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