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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