Colorado State University Receives $750,000 Grant to Find Next Big Internet

Note to Reporters: Photos of Daniel Massey and Christos Papadopoulos are available with the news release at http://www.news.colostate.edu/.

Two Colorado State University computer scientists are part of a national team awarded $7.8 million to explore the next major Internet evolution.

Professors Daniel Massey and Christos Papadopoulos will receive $750,000 of the three-year National Science Foundation grant to examine routing and security measures associated with the Internet. Their multi-institutional team, led by Lixia Zhang at UCLA, will look closely at how to create a new network architecture that’s more focused on what kind of information is needed, not where it is stored.

“You want the data, but it doesn’t matter where the data is,” Massey said. “It’s a different way of looking at the network, and it changes the way you think about the network’s stability and mobility.

“We want to explore a whole new network paradigm and look at security and routing in that context,” he said.

In its request for proposals, NSF “challenged the network science research community to look past the constraints of today’s networks and engage in collaborative, long-range, transformative thinking inspired by lessons learned and promising new research ideas.” The program goal is to “design and experiment with new comprehensive network architectures and networking concepts that can meet the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century.”

NSF awarded grants to four teams across the country; the Colorado State team is part of the largest grant award and the only group from Colorado.

“NSF is looking past incremental improvements of the Internet and technology – they’d like teams across the nation to explore what the next Internet will look like,” Papadopoulos said. “The biggest challenges are mobility and security. With smart phones rapidly becoming dominant in the Internet, how do we best incorporate security? Security and mobility were not designed into the Internet from the beginning.”

Other schools on the NSF grant that includes CSU are the Palo Alto Research Center, University of Arizona, University of Illinois/Urbana-Champaign, UC Irvine, University of Memphis, UC San Diego, Washington University and Yale University.

The grants were awarded through the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the National Science Foundation.

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