Internet Design project in the U.S. and the Future Internet Research and Experimentation project in the European Union, as well as similar efforts in China, Japan, and Korea; it’s more than talk. Here, I propose that we take this opportunity to think more deeply about the fundamentals of communications systems in a variety of disruptive ways to try to escape the intellectual rut we may otherwise get stuck in.

The Internet is built on the packet-switching paradigm, famously co-devised in parallel by Paul Baran and Donald Davies in the early 1970s, replacing the metaphor of electrical circuits and pipes with the idea of statistical multiplexing. Thanks to statistical multiplexing, resource sharing is more flexible than the fixed partitioning used in previous networks, and thanks to buffers, bursty sources of data can take advantage of idle lines in the network, leading to potential efficiency gains. A debate raged in the late 1970s and early 1980s between those favoring the “virtual circuit” and those favoring the “datagram” model of how to build a packet-switching-based communications system. It

The data is in some sense
a shifting interference pattern that
emerges from the mixing and
merging of all sources.