Plan for Evaluating the Hive Mind Concept for GENI

The Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) is an NSF-funded, BBN-operated testbed designed to support experimental research in network science and engineering. The goals for GENI are vast: they seek to “understand networks broadly and at multiple layers of abstraction from the physical substrates through the architecture and protocols to networks of people, organizations, and societies” where “the intellectual space surrounding this challenge is highly interdisciplinary, ranging from new research in network and distributed system design to the theoretical underpinnings of network science, network policy and economics, societal values, and the dynamic interactions of the physical and social spheres with communications networks.” [GEN08c] To provide a backbone, or at least a simulation of “the structure, behavior, and dynamics of our most complex systems—networks of networks,” GENI seeks “to support a wide range of experimental protocols, and data dissemination techniques running over facilities such as fiber optics with nextgeneration optical switches, novel high-speed routers, city-wide experimental urban radio networks, high-end computational clusters, and sensor grids.” [GEN08c] Finally, the “GENI suite is envisioned to be shared among a large number of individual, simultaneous experiments with extensive instrumentation that makes it easy to collect, analyze, and share real measurements.” [GEN08c]