Our Mission
Creating Next Generation Communication Services and Networks
With multiple national and international partners, the International Center for Advanced Internet Research at Northwestern University (iCAIR) engages in large-scale research and development initiatives to create next-generation communication services and networks. iCAIR was established with the understanding that the challenges of creating new communication services and infrastructure will be overcome only through cooperative efforts by experts from many research communities. Consequently, collaborative research partnerships have been established with organizations worldwide, including universities, national federal agencies, national laboratories, corporate research centers, standards organizations, and advanced networking professional organizations.
Because 21st-century national economies are based on digital information, they require advanced digital communications infrastructure. Networking research communities are accelerating the level and pace of advanced networking research by creating innovations in key technologies that significantly transform digital communications - enabling many powerful new capabilities. These innovations have often been described as “disruptive” because they have the potential to revolutionize existing services, practices, capabilities, and infrastructure - significantly improving those implemented today, with higher performance, higher capacity, flexibility, scalability, programmability, expandability, extensibility, reliability, and security. These innovative communication services and networks are being designed to be powerful and transparently provided, ubiquitous, easy to access, and easy to use. Under appropriate policy contexts, information should flow anytime to any place and device. Such services require networks that can rapidly scale, precisely match requirements with resources, dynamically respond to quickly changing conditions, and be managed by autonomic processes.
Reference contexts for developing new services, architecture, and technologies are often emerging and anticipated applications that existing capabilities cannot support. With its research and development partners, iCAIR has established multiple initiatives focused on large-scale transport networks (e.g., L1/L2, using the OSI model), especially for global data-intensive scientific research. Large scale refers to both spatial reach (global, national, regional, state-wide, metro) and overall required data capacity. Many global science applications are compute, data, storage, and bandwidth-intensive, requiring the high-performance transport of terabytes, petabytes, and even exabytes of data over thousands of miles. iCAIR addresses challenges in next-generation networking by undertaking foundational research, designing and implementing experimental research testbeds, and operating advanced networks and exchange facilities.