Early Ideas for a Fresh Start
McKeown and his colleagues already have identified and begun working on four projects that constitute the initial research direction of the program. Some of these efforts are developing prototypes that may presage how a new Internet could work.

A prime example is a prototype 400-user wireless network in the Gates Computer Science Building called Ethane. Ethane embodies a more straightforward approach to designing a secure corporate network than the awkward administrative tricks corporate networks today rely on for security. Graduate student Martin Casado leads the project. He is joined by McKeown; Dan Boneh, an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering; David Mazieres, an assistant professor of computer science; Mendel Rosenblum, an associate professor of computer science; and Scott Shenker, a professor of computer science at the University of California-Berkeley.

Normal corporate networks allow open communication by default, which makes implementing effective security and privacy rules an onerous task for network administrators. Much simpler is Ethane, which starts out prohibiting all communications. Administrators then simply open whatever channels are appropriate within an organization while security is retained by default.

"Ethane is a strict way of controlling who can talk to whom and over what path they can communicate," McKeown says.

A second project addresses the mismatch between the availability of wireless network capacity and the huge growth in the use of wireless devices to access the Internet. Electrical engineering associate professor Andrea Goldsmith and management science and engineering assistant professor Ramesh Johari are researching ways to give wireless devices (PDAs, phones and other handheld devices) the flexibility to find and access pockets of unused spectrum when they need it.

"We are proposing a ‘clean slate’ redesign of wireless spectrum allocation, to ensure efficient utilization of scarce spectrum across both space and time in future wireless systems," says Johari, who holds a courtesy appointment in electrical engineering.

In another project, electrical engineering professor (research) Leonid Kazovsky and McKeown are working to overhaul the interaction between routers closer to the Internet’s "edge," where users connect to it, and those routers that govern the Internet’s telecommunications backbone. Called Lightflow, the project aims to replace big routers in the backbone with high-efficiency optical switches that would be more flexible and responsive to the demands of the routers at the edge. This would allow Internet service providers to get the bandwidth they need exactly when their users need it.

The optical switches are about 10 times cheaper, use 10 times less power and have 10 times the capacity of electronic routers, so using them could cut the cost and power consumption of communications while increasing capacity. But so far no one has been able to develop effective ways to make this happen, McKeown says. Much of the research will focus on developing effective protocols to make such an overhaul feasible.