*GENI PLANNING GROUP DOCUMENTS ARE NO LONGER CURRENT. See GpoDoc and the GENI project pages for up-to-date documents and specifications.*

Facility Goals

A key element of any effort to redesign the Internet is a strategy for fostering the research cycle: drastically lowering the barriers that promising new directions developed by the research community face before transition to industrial development and deployment within the commercial Internet. This requires that we move well beyond the methodologies and facilities used today. An experimental facility that enables the research community to address architectural questions must provide a seamless, end-to-end research process for taking ideas from conception, through validation, to deployment, similar to the idealized process shown below:

Unfortunately, it is well known within the networking research community that we lack effective methodologies and tools for rigorously evaluating, testing, and deploying new ideas. As depicted below:

Today researchers are able to simulate and experiment with small-scale prototypes, but are unable to perform experiments at a meaningful scale. This is not surprising considering the barrier-to-entry for experimenting with a new network architecture or service. A research group would have to arrange for dedicated hardware spread over a wide geographic area, acquire its own networking bandwidth, provide its own management and operational support, be responsible for its own security and fault isolation, implement its own measurement instrumentation, and so on. The consequence of this chasm is that standards bodies and early commercial adopters look with a skeptical eye towards any new networking idea backed solely by simulation results or small-scale experimentation. GENI's main goal is to radically improve the process by which research goes from the idea stage through validation to deployment. GENI is essential to the process of discovering the Future Internet.