The Internet represents a unique opportunity for science and engineering to investigate new concepts for a large scale system that:

  • accesses hundreds of millions of people of all ages and all kinds,
  • accesses hundreds of millions of computers,
  • accesses millions of terabytes of information and computer programs,
  • operates with effective latencies in seconds operates with effective speeds from thousands to millions of bytes per second,
  • moves many billions of dollars and services electronically every year.

In 1990, no such large-scale system existed. Surely the Internet, in the aggregate, has the capability of providing new knowledge and services on an unprecedented scale. A scientist has the opportunity to automate large-scale observations of man, machine, and nature. An engineer has the opportunity to construct new kinds of devices from those that enable the Internet to those that emerge unexpectedly from the infrastructure already provided.

The Internet Systems Laboratory is a scientific engineering laboratory focused on the Internet as the principal subject. We make new observations of men, machines, and nature in order to engineer new infrastructure detail, and to discover emergent new processes. Our engineering goal is to improve the functioning of the Internet. This includes improvements to all aspects of the system:

  • increase its service across people of all kinds and all ages,
  • scale to billions of computers, facilitate access to all the terabytes of information and computer programs,
  • decrease effective latencies to milliseconds, operate at effective speeds to billions of bytes per second,
  • move trillions of dollars and services electronically every year.
We believe “The Internet is in the Details”. Often, a very small decision, a very simple device, in exactly the right place, can have enormous engineering impact. Making the right engineering decisions involves deep technical knowledge of how things currently work, careful observation, experimentation, and an understanding of the vision or goal driving the progress.

Given this broad view, there are many tens of thousands of “Internet Systems Laboratories” already underway around the world. For example, since perfecting microelectronic optical switches will most certainly speed up the Internet and lower its latencies, then a MEMS Optical Switch laboratory is an Internet Systems Laboratory. However, we are not driven by one technology, or one field of study, or another. We are interested in looking across all technologies, psychologies, and socio-political processes to discover places where small changes may, unexpectedly, have large-scale impacts. Our field is the field of study of Internet Systems. We are driven by the notion that the Internet should evolve into the role of a robot servant to individual people, all people.