ITR Collaborative Research: 100 Mb/sec For 100 Million Household

This project is driven by the vision of providing 100 Mb/sec to 100 Million households and small businesses. By providing a greater-than-two-order-of-magnitude increase in end-to-end interconnection speed, such an infrastructure will provide a platform that enables radically new content, applications, and services to emerge over the next decades. This 100 X 100 network has unprecedented speed, scale, and services representing a fundamental departure from today's Internet. Consider a U.S. city with 1 million households and small businesses, each with 100 Mb/sec access to switching centers where they are multiplexed with universities and businesses connected at 1 to 10 Gb/sec speeds. The bandwidth demands are astounding. Up to 100 Terabits per second of residential bandwidth combined with 100s Terabits per second for enterprise and educational traffic, and a single city will approach the 1 Petabit per second threshold. Despite the scale, the network must offer dependable, secure, and guaranteed services to its users.
Thirty years ago, the Internet pioneers had the foresight to see the importance of data communication and its fundamentally different requirements from telephony. Rather than trying to enhance the successful telephony network, they started from a clean slate and invented a technology that has since changed the world. We are at a similar historical crossroads. The design assumptions and requirements that underlie a nation-wide 100 X 100 network are vastly different than those considered by the designers of the original Internet 30 years ago. Consequently, a revolutionary approach, as opposed to an evolutionary one, is required to realize the 100 X 100 vision.
Achieving the 100 X 100 goal requires a three pronged approach:
(1) a clean-slate architecture design that overcomes fundamental limits of today's Internet,
(2) fundamental research that addresses the design of an economical, robust, secure and scalable 100 X 100 network, and
(3) proof-of-concept network implementations to demonstrate how the network of the future can be built.
With this approach, the outcome of this project will result in formulation of the cross-cutting design principles for 100 X 100 including development of simple, structured, and resilient logical overlays and a technology-trend driven design methodology. It will result in a new architecture and protocols that jointly provide
(1) cost-effective and resilient access networks that utilize both fiber-to-the-home and wireless last-hop access,
(2) a scalable, fault-tolerant backbone network having simple logical structure and predictable performance,
(3) economic efficiency that ensures sustained competition, and
(4) security that strikes a balance between accountability vs. anonymity, as well as connectivity vs. isolation.
The 100 X 100 researchers form an interdisciplinary team with expertise in networking architecture, protocols, switch/router design, network management, traffic analysis, network operation, security, and economics, and are uniquely positioned to undertake the definition and accomplishment of the 100 X 100 vision.
The intellectual merit of this research includes the development and evaluation of the 100 X 100 architecture and protocols through the fundamental research identified above. The broader impact of this research includes new applications enabled by 100 X 100, societal impact, and education and outreach impact, ensured by engaging a large number of undergraduate and graduate students in the project, development of classroom software tools, and alliance with a women's college.