Clean Slate Program Explained

The Clean Slate Program was an interdisciplinary research program at Stanford University which considered how the Internet could be redesigned with a "clean slate", without the accumulated complexity of existing systems but using the experience gained in their decades of development.^[1] Its program director was Nick McKeown.^{[2] [3]}

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.^[4]

The research program focused on unconventional, bold, and long-term research that tries to break the network's ossification. 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?"^[2]

Program coordinators identified five key areas for research:^[4]

1. Network architecture
2. Heterogeneous applications
3. Heterogeneous physical-layer technologies
4. Security
5. Economics and policy

The Clean Slate Program ceased in January 2012, after spawning four major follow-up projects:^{[1] [5]}

1. Internet Infrastructure: OpenFlow and Software Defined Networking
2. Mobile Internet: POMI 2020
3. Mobile Social Networking: MobiSocial
4. Data Center: Stanford Experimental Data Center Lab

External links

• Stanford MobiSocial Computing Laboratory
• POMI 2020: Programmable Open Mobile Internet
• Stanford Experimental Data Center Lab
• Topical Coder—Broken Internet

Notes and References

1. Web site: Clean Slate . . 2012-10-30 . 2006-03-14 . https://web.archive.org/web/20060314203503/http://cleanslate.stanford.edu/ . dead .
2. News: Orenstein . David . A broad-based team of Stanford researchers aims to overhaul the Internet . Stanford News . March 14, 2007 . 2012-10-30.
3. Web site: Clean Slate People . Stanford University . 2012-10-30.
4. Web site: About Clean Slate . Stanford University . 2012-10-30.
5. Web site: Clean Slate Research Projects . Stanford University . 2012-10-30.