I m a g e C o u r t e s y o F t h e o P t e P r o J e C t

PEOPLE havE PrEDIcTED the Internet’s death by traffic since its origin. Small proto- col changes have prevented congestive collapse throughout the years, even as the Internet’s fundamental host-to-host structure has remained unchallenged. But that may need to change soon, as an increasing number of sensors, phones, and other mobile devices connecting to the Internet threaten the network’s security and reliability.

The growth is staggering: a Visual Networking Index Mobile Forecast by Cisco Systems estimates that mobile traffic worldwide will increase at a rate of 66% per year, or almost three times that of fixed-IP (Internet Protocol) machines, over the period 2012–2017. The nature of the data is also changing, pulled on one side by monolithic files like movies, and on the other by active streams of small data such as those created by field sensors. Security issues compound the problem, as the data travels in a network that protects the endpoints rather than the data packets themselves. Efforts to scale the Internet will need to take such scaling and security effects into account to preserve its usefulness for years to come.

Several active projects are attempting to design a “future Internet” to meet the challenges of the 21st century, including responding to the effects of mobile-device growth. While their implementations vary, they generally share the assumption that yesteryear’s host-to-host networking design is no longer appropriate in a world where devices change locations, network connections, and configurations frequently.

One large-scale coordinating ef-
fort can be found at the U.S. National
Science Foundation (NSF), which an-
nounced its Future Internet Architec-
that early network. “The purpose of NSF-
NET was to connect researchers and fa-
cilities,” she said. To speed adoption,
“The early NSFNET team decided not
to require security, because they were
concerned that one more requirement
might be the final straw that would
keep universities from connecting to
it.” Such decisions, while appropriate
at the time, would come back to haunt
Internet users years later.

from host-Centric to
Content-Centric networking

One family of emerging solutions focuses on the purpose and content of data, rather than on where it lives. The approach is known as information-centric networking (ICN), a topic in which “there are easily two or three dozen projects going on,” according to Glenn Edens, research director in the Computer Science Laboratory at PARC.

tures (FIA) program in 2010, in addition to announcing funding for three projects that propose ways to augment

(and possibly replace) parts of the Internet in ways that are likely to benefit device access directly. (A fourth “ NEBULA” project focuses on creating a reliable cloud utility; a fifth, “ChoiceNet,” examines economic issues that are relevant to all these projects.)

The FIA program has a long pedigree. It grew out of a “Future Internet

Design” program that funded more than 50 projects between 2004 and 2009; that, in turn, came from the agency’s network architecture work reaching back to NSFNET, the National Science Foundation Network, in the mid-1980s. According to Darleen Fisher, program director for Networking Technology and Systems (Ne TS) at the NSF, some of the current problems find their origins in requirements of making the internet

safe for Gadgets

Initiatives favor direct connections,
named resources, and cryptography.

Technology | DOI: 10.1145/2507771.2507777 Tom Geller