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significant funder of wireless research.

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    In the early 1990s, DARPA was involved in the research on and adoption of asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) technology, as well as research into packet technologies for voice and video. Along with nearly 40 other organizations, DARPA also completed work on the Gigabit Testbed Initiative, an effort by a host of universities, telecommunication carriers, industry, national laboratories, and computer companies to create a number of very-high-speed network testbeds and explore their use for scientific research and other applications.22 In the late 1990s, DARPA also funded the All Optical Networking Consortium, which was formed by the cooperation of Bell Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corporation, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to examine the unique properties of fiber optics for advanced broadband networking. DARPA has also been a long-standing, significant funder of wireless research.

    Currently, telecommunications research programs in support of battlefield communications continue to be a focus of DARPA’s work. Examples include the Information Processing Technology Office’s (IPTO’s) Situation Aware Protocols in Edge Network Technologies (SAPIENT) program,23 and the Advanced Technology Office’s (ATO’s) Information Theory
    and management of future networks. However, although the NeTS program is a welcome source of additional support and programmatic emphasis on telecommunications research, its relatively modest size is likely to have little overall impact on low proposal acceptance rates.

    In 2005, NSF announced the Global Environment for Networking Investigations (GENI) initiative, a program still in the planning stage that will focus on new concepts for networking and distributed system architectures and on experimental facilities to investigate them at large scale. Envisioned as encompassing a broad community effort that engages other agencies and countries, as well as corporate entities, the GENI initiative will emphasize the creation of new networking and distributed system architectures that, for example:

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