Aaah!….. a blast from the past. Tech Review reports that Bolt Beranek and Newman have got the contract to rethink the network design.

NEW YORK (AP) — A government contractor that played a key role in the Internet’s birth will oversee efforts to redesign the network from scratch.

The National Science Foundation announced Monday that BBN Technologies Inc. will get up to $10 million (euro7.5 million) over four years to oversee the planning and design of the Global Environment for Network Innovations, or GENI.

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 NSF already has been funding several projects at universities and elsewhere through Future Internet Network Design, or FIND. It has been pushing to build GENI as a testbed for researchers to explore clean-slate ideas without damaging the current Internet.

Much of the work on GENI so far has been conducted by professors and other researchers. Naming BBN brings a full-time staff to the project, said Larry Peterson, chairman of computer science at Princeton University and head of the GENI planning group.

”They have a track record in large government projects of this sort, and they are very much committed to working with the research community to build the experimental facility we want and need,” Peterson said of BBN…

Footnote: Hmmm… That AP report isn’t entirely accurate. Although BBN played the central role in the design and implementation of the ARPANET, I don’t think it had any significant role in the ‘internetworking’ project that followed from 1973 onwards.