The AKARI Architecture Design Project was a project for designing a new generation computer network architecture supported by the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) of Japan.
The name "AKARI" indicates "A small light in the dark pointing to the future"[1] and it comes from the Japanese word Akari, which means "a small light".
AKARI is also denoted as a Future Internet project.
In 2008, they produced a conceptual design book, which describes their philosophy to pursue an ideal solution by researching new network architectures from a clean slate without being impeded by existing constraints.
[1] To some extent, the AKARI Project was similar to the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) facility of USA and many of the Seventh Framework Programmes (FP7) of EU such as the Future Internet Research and Experimentation.