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, 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.
- Future Internet network design – FIND http://find.isi.edu/
- Clean Slate Program (Stanford university)
- Future Internet Assembly (FIA, Europe)
- 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
- 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)
- NICTA (Australia)
- ANR (France)
- Groupe de Reflexion Internet du Futur (France)
- G-LAB funded by BMBF (Germany)
- AKARI Project (Japan)
- it839/u-it839 and FIF (Future Internet Forum) funded by MIC (Korea) http://www.fif.kr/
- Super Janet funded by EPSRC (UK)
Management
When talking about Future Internet there naturally is also the need to talk about managing the Future Internet. The first question is whether new network management is needed at all or not and what the requirements for such a management is.
In the past, network management has always been considered last in the design process similar to network security.
Currently, there are a set of activities and discussion going on in the direction of such topics. This page should hint to those different activities and directions currently pursued in the area. So no conclusive direction can be given at that point in time.
Emerging 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/
- Dagstuhl Seminar, [1]
- EMANICS Workshop "Vision and Management of the Future Internet", [2]
- 1st IFIP/IEEE International Workshop on Management of the Future Internet (ManFI 2009), [3]
External links
- http://www.future-internet.eu "FIA, Europe"
- http://www.futureinternet.fi "ICT SHOK"
- http://www.internetdelfuturo.es "Internet del Futuro"
- http://www.vinnova.se/upload/EPiStorePDF/AmbientSweden.pdf "Ambient Sweden"
- http://www.ibbt.be "Belgium"
- http://www.ipv6council.lu "Luxembourg"
- http://cit.fbk.eu/future_internet "Italy"
- http://www.futureinternet.ez.nl "Netherlands"
- http://www.futureinternet.ie "Ireland"
- http://www.internetcentre.imperial.ac.uk/about_us "United Kingdom"
- http://www.german-lab.de/project/ "G-Lab: "National Platform for Future Internet Studies"
- http://www.geni.net/index.html "Global Environment for Network Innovations"
- http://www.measurementlab.net/ "Measurement Lab (M-Lab): An Open Platform for Researchers to Deploy Internet Measurement Tools."
- https://www.planet-lab.org/ "PlanetLab: An Open Platform for Developing, deploying, and accessing planetary-scale services"