Future Internet

Future Internet is a summarizing term for worldwide 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 the applied technologies shall not be limited by existing standards or paradigms such as client server networking, which, for example, might evolve into co-operative peer structures. The fact that an IP address denotes both the identifier as well as the locator of an end system, sometimes referred to as semantic overload, is an example of a conceptual shortcoming of the Internet protocol architecture. 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 evolutionary approaches include supplements to existing Internet technology, such as MobileIP, IPSec, DiffServ, HIP, RSerPool, Shim6 or IPv6. Illustrative examples for alternatives that follow the clean slate idea can be found by using search engines. Since most of the projects are either ongoing, or technically not settled yet, and also to avoid instability or bias of this article towards any of them, none of them are listed or explained here.

Regarding the current status of Future Internet, it seems too early to identify any technical consensus or even standardization. Therefore, the term Future Internet should be used with caution only, especially not as a specific technology but instead as an abstract referrer to the visible, worldwide activities in this direction.

The non-technical aspects of the Future Internet span large areas such as socio-economics, business and environmental issues. The OECD has picked up the term and shown activities such as publishing recommendations for the future of the Internet economy, for example (see the activities section).

The time horizon of Future Internet studies is typically considered to be long term, taking several years before significant results can be expected or corresponding deployments take place in the real world.

Research areas that could be seen as components of the Future Internet include Network management, see Management of the Future Internet, Network virtualization, and an approach called network of information, treating any kind of information as objects, independent of their storage or location.

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 Research and Experimentation is a research program funded by the European Union to foster research on the future developments of Internet technology and services. While the list is non-exhaustive, it exemplifies the world wide or national scale, and not on single projects.

• European Future Internet Portal
• FIA - Future Internet Assembly
• EU ICT FP7 Future Internet projects
• Future Internet Research and Experimentation
• FIND - Future Internet network design
• GENI - Global Environment for Network Innovations
• Clean Slate Research Program - Stanford University
• ITU-T Study Group 13 (SG13) on Future Networks including mobile and NGN, focus group FG-FN, Q21/13
• ITFAN Inter-Agency Task Force for Advanced Networking (USA)
• it839/u-it839 (Korea)
• it839/u-it839 and FIF (Future Internet Forum) funded by MIC (Korea) http://www.fif.kr/
• NICTA (Australia)
• ANR (France)
• Groupe de Reflexion Internet du Futur (France)
• G-LAB funded by BMBF (Germany)http://www.german-lab.de/project/
• ICT SHOK (Finland) http://www.futureinternet.fi
• AKARI Project (Japan) http://akari-project.nict.go.jp/eng/index2.htm
• it839/u-it839 and FIF (Future Internet Forum) funded by MIC (Korea) http://www.fif.kr/
• Super Janet funded by EPSRC (UK)
• Plataforma tecnologica española de convergencia hacia IF (Spain) http://www.idi.aetic.es/esInternet/
• Internet del Futuro (Spain) http://www.internetdelfuturo.es
• Ambient sweden http://www.vinnova.se/upload/EPiStorePDF/AmbientSweden.pdf
• Belgium http://www.ibbt.be
• Luxembourg ttp://www.ipv6council.lu
• Italy http://cit.fbk.eu/future_internet
• Netherlands http://www.futureinternet.ez.nl
• Ireland http://www.futureinternet.ie

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/