The greater difficulty today in achieving architectural innovation involves several factors. Multiple visions are now being pursued by various segments of the telecommunications industry, and although an increased diversity of players provides more fertile ground for new ideas, it also makes widespread deployment of good ideas more difficult. Moreover, no single entity is able to appropriate the results of long-term, fundamental research or to comprehensively address the engineering and standardization issues associated with end-to-end solutions that must span multiple service providers and multiple sectors of the industry.
The research that can be conducted by a single vendor or sector is less well positioned to tackle end-to-end issues, and the need to coordinate decisions among a multitude of players greatly complicates achieving major new architectural advances. As a result, vendors tend to favor incremental improvements to today’s networks over more fundamental and high-risk research that seeks major advances in new or enhanced end-to-end applications and services and the architectural innovation that supports them
The roles of NSF (the largest overall federal sponsor of information and communications technology research) and DARPA (a traditionally important sponsor of telecommunications research) have been evolving, with implications for telecommunications research.Long a supporter of networking research and network deployment, NSF is moving toward a more strategic emphasis on telecommunications research.
Although NSF’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate has long supported a networking research program, its Engineering (ENG) directorate supports research in such areas as wireless communications, and several of its engineering research centers have addressed telecommunications, these efforts have not reflected a comprehensive, coordinated research strategy. Modest funding for telecommunications programs has also been accompanied by a reportedly small and shrinking proposal acceptance rate.
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