The National Science Foundation is planning to re-engineer the internet to overcome its shortcomings and create a network better suited for a computerized world, reports the New York Times. The new project, the Global Environment for Networking Investigations (GENI) was publicly described last week.

The new network would focus on security; "pervasive computing" environments consisting of mobile, wireless and sensor networks; control of critical infrastructure; and the ability to handle new services that can be used by millions of people.

Part of the intent is to design a network better able to handle traffic from the level of individual users. Researchers expect an explosion of data in the next decade from mobile and wireless devices as well as sensors that will vastly outnumber today's PCs.

Faster transmission speeds are not one of the design goals of the new network. "Making a network faster has never made it more secure or easier to use," said David Clark, a senior research scientist at the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.