The notion of a wave is optimized for
resilience through massive scale, not for local efficiency.

turns out that the idea of a “flow” in the Internet is not very different from a virtual circuit; indeed, with so many stateful middle boxes (such as network address translation, firewalls, proxies, and multiproto-col-label-switching switched/routers), one can now say that the whole debate was futile.

However, the future needs of networks will be different from the simple circuit or packet system that has dominated for the past century, as society shifts from its historical patterns of work and entertainment. The vast majority of network content is pull/interest-based; economics [ 1] argues for making the “long tail” of content available at low transac-tion/network costs to large numbers of small groups of only the most interested recipients.

The decrease in the need for synchronization in remote activities for video, audio, and static content argues that networks, including the Internet, be optimized for nonconcurrent use. On the other hand, people want low latency, which argues for nearby or local copies of all content. Thus, we might talk about “asynchronization of multicast” and commercialization of peer-to-peer communication and content sharing. Rich-value content creators would love to eliminate any intermediaries while also pushing storage and its costs to edge users.

Technology push also plays a role in Internet-based communications. Software has changed since the days of layered system design; today, we sustain reliable software built from well-contained components assembled with wrappers designed to enforce behavior. How is this relevant to a future Internet architecture? For one thing, that architecture could be more diversified, with less commonality in the nodes (hosts and routers) than we have had for the past 20 years of PCs, servers, and routers all coming from the same technology stable.

This also fits my wave-particle model of how technology is changing within networks and protocols. Recent papers, including [ 2], have proposed replacing the layered protocol stack with a graph or even a heap (pile) of soft protocol components. However, we can also look at the network topology itself and see that

the role of nodes is changing within it. Perhaps all nodes are the equivalent of middle boxes, revisiting the old Internet idea that any component with more than one network interface can be a router. We see it in our end-user devices—in my case the Macintosh iBook I typed this essay on and the Windows smart phone in my pocket, each with at least three built-in radios and a wired network interface. When we interconnect these devices, the network communication topology is far more dynamic than any public network has been in the past.

Many of the increasingly heterogeneous “links” connecting devices are also not well characterized as “pipes”; indeed, the capacity of a volume of space containing a number of mobile devices is simply not known; some physical bounds are known, but the equivalent of a Shannon Limit in information-theory terms is not. This lack of information argues that network architects need a temporal graph model of the network. It also argues that today’s architectures are unable to accommodate the resources model in a temporal graph. Simply labeling the edges of the graph with weights to represent capacity or delay does not capture the right information.

One more critical piece of technology—network coding—further muddies the effort to devise a grand unified network architecture that would maintain the wave-particle duality analogy. Practical network coding in wireless and wired networks promises to remove much of the complexity in resource management. Network coding involves the merging of packets (such as by XOR in the simplest form) transmitted along common subpaths. Network coding can be combined with redundancy for reliability.

So how might the wave-particle duality idea be applied to a network? The Internet is already dominated by swarms of network-coded content, no longer flowing from place to place but emanating like ripples on a pond from multiple points, then becoming available for local consumption. Neal Stephenson predicted this with remarkable prescience in his novel The Diamond Age [ 3]. Publication of new content is the start of a new wave. The content spreads through