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As reported by the Associated Press this week, the National Science Foundation has announced that BBN Technologies Inc. will receive up to $10 million over four years to oversee the planning and design of the Global Environment for Network Innovations, or GENI. Posted on its website, GENI is defined as following:

"GENI is an experimental facility called the Global Environment for Network Innovation. GENI is designed to allow as a experiments on a wide variety of problems in communications, networking, distributed systems, cyber-security, and networked services and applications. The emphasis is on enabling researchers to experiment with radical network designs in a way that is far more realistic than they can today. Researchers will be able to build their own new versions of the "net" or to study the "net" in ways that are not possible today. Compatibility, with the Internet is NOT required. The purpose of GENI is to give researchers the opportunity to experiment unfettered by assumptions or requirements and to support those experiments at a large scale with real user populations."

Many researchers want to rethink the Internet's underlying architecture, saying a "clean-slate" approach is the only way to truly address security, mobility and other challenges that have cropped up since the Internet's birth in 1969. The construction on GENI could start about 2010 and expected to cost $350 million, as reported by the Associated Press.

Read full story: Yahoo! News

Related topics: Security