BY JON CROWCROFT
TOWARD A NETWORK
ARCHITECTURE THAT
DOES EVERYTHING
In the same way light propagates through a medium, analogous
wave-particle principles could help model communications through the
future Internet architecture.

Here’s a new way (I’ve liberally adapted from physics) to define the future network paradigm: Use the notion of wave-particle duality to view a network with swarms of coded content as the dual of packets. The wave model maps all the way down the metaphor food chain to the analog level but should be seen mainly as an analogy that works like this: First, new sources of content introduce material at multiple places in the network (including through sensor, video, and audio input), representing the start of a new wave of network traffic. The content spreads by matching agent and user subscriptions/interests to content descriptions at rendezvous points throughout the network. The analogy is also likely to go wrong in interesting ways. I hope we’ll be able to use them to inspire us to come up with a new unified network architecture, sharing it in future issues of Communications.

One temptation computer scientists are known to indulge is to spin grand unified theories, possibly due to an innate inferiority complex when looking over the fence at physics (or perhaps because some of us started life as physicists). Whatever the reason, it shows up in networking as a desire to unify all communications under a single all-inclusive, all-welcoming design, system, or architecture. In telecommunications networks, historically successful for much longer than

the Internet, the paradigm is circuit switching. Meanwhile, broadcast networks (first radio, later TV) have been around for the past century. Multiplexed, isolated circuits still dominate; for example, more than 2. 5 billion cell phones in the world today operate this way, despite the growth and promise of voice over IP on the Internet. Two side effects of this design choice are that calls are billable and the use of resources is quantifiable.

What about the future Internet? Many research programs have been proposed, including the Future