The Clean Slate Program was an interdisciplinary
research program
A research program (British English: research programme) is a professional network of scientists conducting basic research. The term was used by philosophy of science, philosopher of science Imre Lakatos to blend and revise the normative model of ...
at
Stanford University which considered how the
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a ''internetworking, network of networks'' that consists ...
could be redesigned with a "
clean slate", without the accumulated complexity of existing systems but using the experience gained in their decades of development.
Its program director was
Nick McKeown Nicholas (Nick) William McKeown FREng, is the SVP/GM of the Network and Edge Group at Intel and a professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments at Stanford University. He has also started technology companies in Silicon ...
.
Program outline
Clean Slate was based on the belief that the current Internet has significant deficiencies that need to be solved before it can become a unified global communication infrastructure, and that the Internet's shortcomings will not be resolved by the conventional incremental and backward-compatible style of academic and industrial networking research.
The research program focused on unconventional, bold, and long-term research that tries to break the network's
ossification
Ossification (also called osteogenesis or bone mineralization) in bone remodeling is the process of laying down new bone material by cells named osteoblasts. It is synonymous with bone tissue formation. There are two processes resulting in ...
. To this end, the program was characterized by two research questions:
* "With what we know today, if we were to start again with a clean slate, how would we design a global communications infrastructure?"
* "How should the Internet look in upcoming 15 years?"
Program coordinators identified five key areas for research:
#
Network architecture
Network architecture is the design of a computer network. It is a framework for the specification of a network's physical components and their functional organization and configuration, its operational principles and procedures, as well as commun ...
#
Heterogeneous applications
# Heterogeneous
physical-layer technologies
#
Security" \n\n\nsecurity.txt is a proposed standard for websites' security information that is meant to allow security researchers to easily report security vulnerabilities. The standard prescribes a text file called \"security.txt\" in the well known locat ...
#
Economics
Economics () is the social science that studies the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.
Economics focuses on the behaviour and interactions of economic agents and how economies work. Microeconomics analy ...
and policy
The Clean Slate Program ceased in January 2012, after spawning four major follow-up projects:
# Internet Infrastructure:
OpenFlow and
Software Defined Networking
Software-defined networking (SDN) technology is an approach to network management that enables dynamic, programmatically efficient network configuration in order to improve network performance and monitoring, making it more like cloud computing t ...
# Mobile Internet: POMI 2020
# Mobile Social Networking: MobiSocial
# Data Center: Stanford Experimental Data Center Lab
References
{{reflist
External links
Stanford MobiSocial Computing LaboratoryPOMI 2020: Programmable Open Mobile InternetStanford Experimental Data Center Lab
Internet architecture