Early NSF-funded SDN research. In 2001, a National Academies report, Looking Over the Fence at Networks: A Neighbor’s View of Networking Research,30 pointed to the perils of Internet ossification: an inability of networks to change to satisfy new needs. The report highlighted three dimensions of ossification: intellectual (backward compatibility limits creative ideas), infrastructure (it is hard to deploy new ideas into the infrastructure), and system (rigid architecture led to fragile, ...
