In 2005, NSF announced the Global Environment for Networking Investigations (GENI) initiative, a program still in the planning stage that will focus on new concepts for networking and distributed system architectures and on experimental facilities to investigate them at large scale. Envisioned as encompassing a broad community effort that engages other agencies and countries, as well as corporate entities, the GENI initiative will emphasize the creation of new networking and distributed system architectures that, for example:

Build in security and robustness;Enable the vision of pervasive computing and bridge the gap between the physical and virtual worlds by including mobile, wireless, and sensor networks;Enable control and management of other critical infrastructures; Include ease of operation and usability; and Enable new classes of societal-level services and applications

Long a source of support for research on large-scale problems, DARPA has led in computer networking (via the ARPANET and its derivatives) and in the creation of the Internet (via its support of TCP/IP protocols and related computer networking services such as e-mail, ftp, gopher, and others) and remains committed today to advances in telecommunications-focused research. In the early 1990s, DARPA was involved in the research on and adoption of asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) technology, as well as research into packet technologies for voice and video. Along with nearly 40 other organizations, DARPA also completed work on the Gigabit Testbed Initiative, an effort by a host of universities, telecommunication carriers, industry, national laboratories, and computer companies to create a number of very-high-speed network testbeds and explore their use for scientific research and other applications.22 In the late 1990s, DARPA also funded the All Optical Networking Consortium, which was formed by the cooperation of Bell Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corporation, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to examine the unique properties of fiber optics for advanced broadband networking. DARPA has also been a long-standing, significant funder of wireless research.

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