The aim of the project is to develop new solutions for the control architecture of the Internet that remove the known and emerging technical deficiencies while avoiding prejudging commercial and social outcomes for the different players. The focus is the generic control functions of the Internet – the neck of the hour-glass, but for control:

• Reachability: The main focus is the problem of inter-domain routing, including policy control but also integrating filtering at trust boundaries (e.g. firewalls, NATs). Key issues include multihoming, scalability and fast convergence.
• Resource control: The main focus is how to deliver effective and efficient control of sharing of resource. Key issues include how to share resources fairly and stop cheating, high speed congestion control and load balancing (traffic engineering).

But further, all this must be under:

• Social and Commercial Control: the architecture will permit conflicting outcomes to coexist and evolve and will not embed assumptions that unreasonably favour certain types of industry player: “designed for tussle”.

Our objective is bold: to re-architect the world’s ICT infrastructure. In order to be credible, we will have to deliver a coherent set of changes solving technical and commercial problems together: a unified control architecture for the Internet that can be adapted in a scalable, dynamic, autonomous and robust manner to local operational and business requirements.