Network Science and Engineering  (NetSE)

SYNOPSIS

In the past decade, our network infrastructure has undergone radical changes. It has evolved from a small number of interconnected computer networks to a global socio-technical infrastructure, where people communicate and interact spontaneously in cyber space and with the cyber physical world, create content and share knowledge over a network of heterogeneous networks. In the future, global society will increasingly rely on socio-technical networks designed in harmony with societal values and economic viability, with enhanced security, privacy, resilience, availability and manageability, and the ability to incorporate as yet unforeseen technologies, applications and services.

The Network Science and Engineering (NetSE) program encourages members of all network science and engineering communities to engage in integrative thinking to advance, seed and sustain the transformation of networking research to enable the socio-technical networks of the future. The focus is on innovative research efforts that address new or as yet unsolved critical network challenges that by their nature require expertise and synergy from different areas of computing, as well as other relevant fields such as engineering, mathematics, economics, and the social sciences.

The NetSE program seeks proposals focused on developing new theoretical foundations, principles and methodologies to understand and reason about the dynamics and behavior of current and future large-scale networks, the interdependence among the physical, informational and social networks they embody, and the tradeoffs among communication, computation and storage. Of interest are also new models that can inform the development of information systems and the networking and communications technologies that underlie them, and give coherence to the highly diverse ways users might access information in the future.

NetSE also subsumes the programmatic area known as FIND, which explores radical future innovations in network design to meet the requirements of future socio-technical networks. The focus is on "clean slate", multi-disciplinary approaches, unconstrained by the current Internet. This undertaking requires rethinking network functions and design strategies, in the context of a range of scientific, technical and social challenges and opportunities. The emphasis is on creating theoretically grounded architectures that address fundamental policy and design engineering trade-offs, support healthy economic models and promote social benefits.

Network architecture and protocol design challenges also arise when seeking discovery, invocation and composition of globally distributed, highly evolving services and information systems designed for networks of extreme heterogeneity and complexity. Consequently, the program will support the exploration of new frameworks and methodologies that support internet-scale, topologically-aware models of computation and autonomous computational agents, and new approaches for providing timely and coherent access to information when the magnitude and speed of the information flow dwarfs our ability to transport, process, or comprehend it directly. New paradigms and frameworks are also of interest, to enable new applications that provide information based on both content and context and to improve or enable existing or new classes of applications, such gaming, virtual worlds, augmented reality and tele-presence.

Imbued with cognitive capabilities and context-awareness, pervasive systems are increasingly and inextricably permeating the fabric of our society with great potential for richer social and economic experiences and an improved quality of life. Many NetSE challenges, however, stand between our current state and a full realization of environment, situation and human aware pervasive networked systems. The NetSE program will support research on new paradigms, guiding principles, innovative models and sound methodologies for acquiring and seamlessly embedding relevant context information into the network architecture, protocols and services to support reliable and predictable pervasive systems and applications with different quality of service requirements or unique characteristics, such as mobility and energy constraints, and in contexts where applications may require proactive and timely action.

The NetSE program seeks broad, interdisciplinary advances in network science and engineering, and thus anticipates that successful projects with multiple investigators will typically need to bring together a team of people with different, complementary expertise, and single-investigator proposals will need to show that the investigator has expertise in two or more CISE-related areas, appropriate for the projects proposed. Research in NetSE is expected to have an assessment plan that might include, for example, formal verification, simulation, modeling, proof-of-concept development, prototype testing on a testbed, or, when applicable, usability evaluation involving human subjects.

Network Science and Engineering Point of Contact:

Darleen L. Fisher, Point of Contact, Network Science and Engineering Program, telephone: (703) 292-8950, email: dlfisher@nsf.gov

Funding Opportunities for Network Science and Engineering (NeTSE):

CISE Cross-Cutting Programs: FY 2009 and FY 2010

THIS PROGRAM IS PART OF

CISE Cross-Cutting Programs: FY 2009 and FY 2010