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 widespread.
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, SCTP, 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[1], business and environmental issues. The OECD[2] 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[3][4][5] [6], Network virtualization, and an approach called network of information, treating any kind of information as objects, independent of their storage or location.
More recently, elements of cloud computing have blended into the notion of Future Internet, leading to the concept of cloud networking, which is actively researched.
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 the (numerous) individual on-going or finished 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
- TARIFA - The Atomic Redesign of the Internet Future Architecture
- ITU-T Study Group 13 (SG13) on Future Networks including mobile and NGN, focus group FG-FN, Q21/13 [2]
- 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)
- ICT SHOK (Finland) [3]
- AKARI Project (Japan) [4]
- Super Janet funded by EPSRC (UK) [5]
- Plataforma tecnologica española de convergencia hacia IF (Spain) [6]
- Internet del Futuro (Spain) [7]
- Ambient Sweden [8]
- Belgium [9]
- Luxembourg [10]
- Italy [11]
- Netherlands [12]
- Ireland http://www.futureinternet.ie
- United Kingdom FISG [13]
- Finland - Finnish ICT SHOK research programme [www.futureinternet.fi]
- Spain - Internet del Futuro [www.internetdelfuturo.es]
- Germany - G-Lab
- France - Groupe de Reflexion Internet du Futur - GRIF [14]
- Euro-NF / Anticipating the Network of the Future - From Theory to Design http://euronf.org
- Autonomic Internet Project [15]
- Reservoir -Cloud Computing Project [16]
Notes
- ^ Future Internet Socio Economics Working Group
- ^ OECD Future Internet
- ^ Dagstuhl Seminar on "Management of the Future Internet"
- ^ EMANICS Workshop "Vision and Management of the Future Internet"
- ^ 1st IFIP/IEEE International Workshop on Management of the Future Internet (ManFI 2009), [1]
- ^ UniverSelf project
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/
- A. Galis, H. Abramowicz, M. Brunner, D. Raz, P.R. Chemouil, J. Butler, C. Polychronopoulos, S. Clayman, H. de Meer, T. Coupaye, A. Pras, K. Sabnani, P. Massonet, S. Naqvi “Management and Service-aware Networking Architectures (MANA) for Future Internet - Position Paper: System Functions, Capabilities and Requirements” -Future Internet Assembly [17] and Invited paper IEEE 2009 Fourth International Conference on Communications and Networking in China (ChinaCom09?) 26-28 August 2009, Xi'an, China; http://www.chinacom.org/2009/index.html
- M. R. Khondoker, B. Reuther, D. Schwerdel, A. Siddiqui and P. Mueller “Describing and Selecting Communication Services in a Service Oriented Network Architecture” in the proceedings of the ITU-T Kaleidoscope event, Pune, India, 13-15 Dec 2010
- Domingue, J., Galis, A., Gavras, A., Zahariadis, T., Lambert, D., Cleary, F., Daras, P., Krco, S., Müller, H., Li, M.-S., Schaffers, H., Lotz, V., Alvarez, F., Stiller, B., Karnouskos, S., Avessta, S., Nilsson, M. (Eds.) – “The Future Internet - Future Internet Assembly 2011: Achievements and Technological Promises” - Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 6656, 465 pp, ISBN 978-3-642-20897-3, 4th May 2011- Springer http://www.springer.com/computer/communication+networks/book/978-3-642-20897-3