Future Internet

Future Internet is a summarizing term for world-wide research activities dedicated to the further development of the original Internet (see also History_of_the_Internet).

While the technical development of the Internet has been an extensive research topic from the beginning, an increased public awareness of several critical shortcomings in terms of performance, reliability, scalability, security and many other categories including societal, economical and business aspects, has led to Future Internet research efforts.

Given the diversity of technologies related to the Internet, extended by lower and higher layers and applications, the related research topics are wide spread.

In addition, the approaches towards a Future Internet range from small, incremental evolutionary steps to complete redesigns (clean slate) and architecture principles, where, for example, applied technologies shall not be limited by existing standards. The clean slate type of approaches are based on the experience that supplementary or late additions to an original and established design are limited in their acceptance and introduction. Technical examples for supplements are MobileIP, IPSec, DiffServ, HIP, RSerPool, Shim6 or IPv6. The fact that an IP address denotes both the identifier as well as the locator of an end system, known as 'semantic overloading', is an example of a conceptual shortcoming of the Internet architecture.

The time horizon of Future Internet studies is typically considered to be long term, which means that it may take up to ten years before significant results can be expected or corresponding deployments take place in the real world.

National and international implementation plans and activities

While Future Internet is often connotated with the Global Environment for Network Innovations initiatives of the NSF, several other international research programmes have adopted this term.

• Future Internet network design – FIND http://find.isi.edu/
• Clean Slate Program (Stanford university)
• EU IST FP7 Future Internet projects http://www.future-internet.eu/activities/fp7-projects.html
• Future Internet Research and Experimentation http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/fire
• ITFAN
• it839/u-it839 (Korea)
• NICTA (Australia)
• ANR (France)
• G-LAB funded by BMBF (Germany)
• AKARI Project (Japan)
• it839/u-it839 and FIF (Future Internet Forum) funded by MIC (Korea)
• Super Janet funded by EPSRC (UK)

Emerging new network platforms

• PlanetLab, Onelab
• Emulab (shared clusters)

References

• Roscoe T. The end of Internet architecture. In: Proceedings of the fifth workshop on hot topics in networks (HotNets-V), Irvine, USA, November 2006.
• M. Handley: Why the Internet only just works BT Technology Journal, Vol 24, No 3, July 2006.
• MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. Newarch project: Future-generation internet architecture. 2003. Information available at: http://www.isi.edu/newarch/
• 100x100network. 100 × 100 clean slate project. 2003. Information available at: http://100x100network.org/
• McKeown N, Girod B. Clean slate design for the Internet. April 2006. Whitepaper; Information available at: http://cleanslate.stanford.edu/
• Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Assurable global networking. 2006. Information available at: http://www.darpa.mil/sto/solicitations/AGN/index.html
• National Science Foundation. Networking Technology and Systems (NeTS). 2006. Information available at http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf07507/nsf07507.htm
• Tafazolli R. Post-ip working group. Presentation at the second general assembly of the eMobility European technology platform, November 2006. Information available at http://www.emobility.eu.org/GA2/GA2-intro.html
• VINI Consortium. VINI Homepage. 2006. Information available at http://www.vini-veritas.net/