Stanford, Deutsche Telekom, NEC Form Clean Slate Lab to Prototype ‘Disruptive’ New Internet Technologies

STANFORD, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Stanford University’s Clean Slate Internet Design Program, a nothing-is-sacred research effort to rethink the globe’s ossified communications infrastructure, today announced the formation of the Clean Slate Lab, in which professors, students, research staff and professional engineers will deploy prototypes of program ideas in research and operational networks. Stanford created the lab with Deutsche Telekom in Germany and NEC in Japan as the founding sponsors.

“NEC expects the Clean Slate Lab to create ground-breaking innovations for the future Internet infrastructure”

“The goal of the Clean Slate program is to reinvent the Internet to meet the needs of the future through fundamental and ‘disruptive’ advances, rather than incremental patches and work-arounds,” said Guru Parulkar, the program’s executive director. “To make enduring transformations, however, we need to test and prove our ideas in action under realistic network conditions. The Clean Slate Lab will be where we make our research ideas real.”

The lab will be directed by Guido Appenzeller, a Consulting Assistant Professor at Stanford, and a co-founder and former CTO of security startup Voltage Security.

The Stanford researchers are being joined by five full-time engineers—three from Deutsche Telekom and two from NEC. Including the value of the engineers’ time, each company has pledged to support the lab with $750,000 a year for three years, a total of $4.5 million over that timeframe. The two companies are already supporters of the overall Clean Slate program, which is also supported by Cisco, NTT DoCoMo, Xilinx and the National Science Foundation.

“NEC expects the Clean Slate Lab to create ground-breaking innovations for the future Internet infrastructure,” said Toshiyuki Kanoh, General Manager of the NEC Central Research Lab. “NEC also hopes that research and development in the lab will improve the long-term health of the global Internet economy.”

Peter Möckel, head of Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, added: “Deutsche Telekom is fully aware of the commercial and scalability limitations of the current Internet. By actively contributing to research and development in the Clean Slate Lab we are looking forward to bringing together business aspects, questions of network operation and the latest progress of new technologies in an innovative architecture, which will be effective enough to enable sustainable economic growth and to open new business opportunities.”

Realizing research

One example of how the Clean Slate Lab’s engineers will roll up their sleeves will be to design, prototype, deploy, and disseminate technology developed as part of a flagship project called the Programmable Open Mobile Internet 2020 (POMI 2020), which was funded in August with a $10 million NSF grant. POMI 2020 is motivated by the recognition that in the near future millions if not billions of users will carry smart handheld devices with high-speed wireless network connectivity. This constitutes a revolution, Parulkar says, that creates an opportunity for new software services and applications not seen since the advent of the World Wide Web. This will only happen, however, if currently closed and incompatible networks are replaced with an open platform for development.

As part of the POMI 2020 effort, the lab is currently focused on developing a technology called OpenFlow that makes closed and incompatible switches and routers programmable via a standardized interface. This allows researchers to write their own network services such as routing, access control, mobility management, and many others, and to experiment with their ideas on a production network with real applications and users. The lab will also use OpenFlow to deploy a prototype system of wireless infrastructure, devices and applications across the Stanford campus. Parulkar said he believes it will be the most comprehensive, experimental deployment of mobile technology ever performed by a university.

About the Clean Slate Design for the Internet

Launched in March 2007, the Clean Slate Design for the Internet is an industrial affiliate program in the Stanford School of Engineering characterized by two questions: “With what we know today, if we were to start again with a clean slate, how would we design a global communications infrastructure?” and “How should the Internet look in 15 years?” The director of the program is Stanford electrical engineering and computer science Associate Professor Nick McKeown.

For more information visit http://cleanslate.stanford.edu.