A research programme, revisited
Five research directions. A shared question: what should the Internet become?
An independent historical collection of the Future Internet Architecture programme: its research proposals, investigator meetings and original documents.
FIA brought network researchers together to explore trustworthy alternatives to the Internet’s existing architecture. The programme followed earlier NSF work in Future Internet Design (FIND) and Network Science and Engineering (NetSE), and considered social, economic and legal questions alongside technical design.
Four initial projects were funded in 2010: NDN, MobilityFirst, NEBULA and XIA. ChoiceNet subsequently joined the wider architectural discussion through a separate award.
Name the data, not its location.
NDN explored communication organised around named content rather than destination host addresses. Its proposal made data a first-class entity, combined data authentication with trust models, and studied routing, forwarding, caching and privacy.
Historical principal investigator
Lixia Zhang · UCLA
Make mobility the starting point.
MobilityFirst treated mobile endpoints and changing connectivity as normal conditions. Its design combined naming, mobility support and storage-aware networking, studying robustness during disconnection and the trade-off between mobility and scalability.
Historical principal investigator
Dipankar Raychaudhuri · Rutgers University
Build around trustworthy cloud services.
NEBULA examined an architecture centred on cloud data centres connected by a dependable core. The work investigated secure data, control and core-network mechanisms for network services that need to remain available.
Historical principal investigator
Jonathan Smith · University of Pennsylvania
Leave room for future network entities.
XIA explored a network supporting hosts, content and services while allowing new kinds of communicating entities. Its research joined intrinsic security with questions of usability, economic incentives and public policy.
Historical principal investigator
Peter Steenkiste · Carnegie Mellon University
Treat choice as an architectural principle.
ChoiceNet investigated economic mechanisms for sustained innovation in the network. The proposal focused on discoverable alternatives, user choice between services and ways to reward better offerings. It followed the four initial FIA awards under a separate solicitation.
Historical principal investigator
Tilman Wolf · University of Massachusetts
The investigator meetings moved from project introductions and security to economics, architecture comparisons, trials, evaluation and Values in Design. This collection restores the principal meeting records at their historical addresses.
Explore the meeting chronology →
Original nets-fia.net homepage, January 2016 · NSF FIA solicitation.
Project descriptions are historical summaries. This reconstruction is not an official NSF or MIT service.
Choose a starting point
Three meeting records open different routes into the programme.