Clean Slate Program

The Clean Slate Program was an interdisciplinary research program at Stanford University which considered how the Internet could be redesigned with a "clean slate", without the accumulated complexity of existing systems but using the experience gained in their decades of development.^[1] Its program director was Nick McKeown.^[2][3]

Program outline

Clean Slate was based on the belief that the current Internet has significant deficiencies that need to be solved before it can become a unified global communication infrastructure, and that the Internet's shortcomings will not be resolved by the conventional incremental and backward-compatible style of academic and industrial networking research.^[4]

The research program focused on unconventional, bold, and long-term research that tries to break the network's ossification. To this end, the program was characterized by two research questions:^{[citation needed]}

• "With what we know today, if we were to start again with a clean slate, how would we design a global communications infrastructure?"^{[citation needed]}
• "How should the Internet look in upcoming 15 years?"^[2]

Program coordinators identified five key areas for research:^[4]

1. Network architecture
2. Heterogeneous applications
3. Heterogeneous physical-layer technologies
4. Security
5. Economics and policy

The Clean Slate Program ceased in January 2012, after spawning four major follow-up projects:^[1][5]

1. Internet Infrastructure: OpenFlow and Software Defined Networking
2. Mobile Internet: POMI 2020
3. Mobile Social Networking: MobiSocial
4. Data Center: Stanford Experimental Data Center Lab