Clean Slate Program

The Clean Slate Program is an interdisciplinary research program at Stanford University which aims to consider how the internet would be redesigned with a "Clean Slate". Its Program Director is Nick McKeown.

Program outline

It is 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.

The program aims to focus on unconventional, bold, and long-term research that tries to break the network's ossification. To this end, the research program is characterized by two research questions:

• "With what we know today, if we were to start again with a clean slate, how would we design a global communications infrastructure".
• "How should the Internet look in upcoming 15 years."

Program members aim to measure success in the long-term: looking back in 15 years time to see significant impact.

Program coordinators identify five key areas for research:

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

Program team expect these areas will evolve and perhaps change completely as the program progresses.

External links

• Topical Coder—Broken Internet