2020 Vision: Why You Won’t Recognize the ‘Net in 10 Years

by Carolyn Duffy Marsan, Network World

As they imagine the Internet of 2020, computer scientists across the country are starting from scratch and re-thinking everything: from IP addresses to DNS to routing tables to Internet security in general. They’re envisioning how the Internet might work without some of the most fundamental features of today’s ISP and enterprise networks.

Their goal is audacious: To create an Internet without so many security breaches, with better trust and built-in identity management. Researchers are trying to build an Internet that’s more reliable, higher performing and better able to manage exabytes of content. And they’re hoping to build an Internet that extends connectivity to the most remote regions of the world, perhaps to other planets.

Leading Internet engineers are striving to rethink the Internet so that it is much more secure, reliable, and widely available than it is now, and the U.S. National Science Foundation is challenging researchers to invent concepts for such an Internet architecture that can be prototyped on the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) virtual networking lab. This high-risk, long-range Internet research will kick into high gear in 2010, as NSF ramps up funding to allow a handful of projects to move out of the lab and into prototype. Indeed, the aim is to build the world’s largest virtual network lab across 14 college campuses and two nationwide backbone networks so that it can engage thousands – perhaps millions – of end users in its experiments.

One such concept is content-centric networking under development at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). Content-centric networking employs file names and URLs to identify content rather than IP addresses to identify the machines that store content. PARC researcher Van Jacobson proposes that content would be assigned a structured name that can be searched for and retrieved by users, allowing them to find the nearest copy. Trust is imbued within the data itself rather than within the machine it is stored on, and Jacobson says this offers greater security because end users choose what content they want to get.

Another futuristic Internet architecture that will run on the GENI infrastructure is a new mobile wireless network developed by Howard University researchers. Their research concentrates on opportunistic networks that do not boast constant Internet linkage, and which would utilize peer-to-peer communications to transfer communications if the network is inaccessible. Howard professor Jiang Li speculates that such an architecture could be useful for data transmission and be complementary to cellular networks.

The GENI platform also will run a social networking-based architecture conceived by researchers at the University of California, Davis. The architecture is designed to generate connections based on trust and true identities using the format of Facebook to promulgate links on the Internet, says Davis professor S. Felix Wu.

Report on www.networkworld.com/news/2010/010410-outlook-vision.html?page=1 and Good luck! – DCL