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.