The Future of Internet
FP7 Challenges
3.4 Presentation of FP7 Challenges and Instruments
There are three major ICT industrial challenges in FP7 and those are addressed in the 2007/2008 work-programme, broadly referring to networked infrastructure, intelligent systems and components. Another set of four challenges has been opened to support several socio-economic goals, related to the health, the support of mobility, energy efficiency, environment and vehicle intelligence, the inclusion of all people, and the digital libraries and content.
The first ICT challenge is called ‘Pervasive and Trustworthy Network and Service Infrastructures’. This Challenge includes the R&D activities that will be related to the future Internet under FP7. It includes several objectives related to networking, services, trust and security, Enterprise networking, networked media and experimental facilities that are all related to specific facets of a multi-dimensional issue such as the future Internet.
Network and service infrastructures underpin the economic progress and the development of our societies: more than 2 billion mobile terminals are commercial operation, 1 billion Internet users, and 400 million broadband internet users. The demand for such infrastructures is changing for increasing user control of content/services, for networking ‘things’ (e.g. TVv, PC phone, sensors or tags), for convergence (e.g. networks, devices or services – video, audio, data or voice).
Current technologies can be - and need to be - improved significantly for scaling up and more flexibility, for better security, dependability and robustness and for higher performance and more functionality.
Europe is well-positioned with respect to industry, technology and use (network equipment and services, business software, middleware, security, home systems …)
The next 5-10 years we expect to see several changes. From the current state of “convergence” where users still need to handle separate networks, deal with several devices and disparate services, we will move to an environment where networked services will be seamless, ubiquitous broadband, mobile and reconfigurable to load/use/context; the anywhere, anytime and any device vision will likely be a reality. From billions of networked devices we will have in the order of trillions. From the mere realization of the importance of security and trust with the addition of some rather simple and ad hoc “adds on”, we will create environments with built-in security and trust. The current shaky robustness and dependability should improve with highly dependable software and systems. Finally, the difficulty in coping with the fragmentation of the value chain today is expected to be greatly addressed, yielding mechanisms to deal with distributed value chain and networked enterprises.
Towards the network of the future, several enhancements and achievements need to be undertaken, to yield ubiquitous network infrastructures and architectures, optimised control, management and flexibility of the future network infrastructure, and technologies and system architectures for the future internet.
Is the Internet reaching its limits? The Internet has today some visible space for improvement: to scale-up its network capabilities; to manage the service delivery; to move from static to mobile delivery; to ensure political neutrality; to develop new business models; to be adaptive, also to the location; to handle rich content; to integrate an unlimited number of devices; to ensure reliable security for all parties.
With respect to the Internet business landscape (in terms of terminals, content, business models, services, application development, web services infrastructure, network infrastructure, physical infrastructure), Europe appears to have mainly strengths in the terminals and network infrastructure sectors, and be almost absent from the others; clearly, Europe needs to do better with respect to the other sectors. Europe needs to be leading the future Internet network standards and as Europe has 30% of the ICT market, it needs also to strive to have 30% of the IPR (which is not the case today). For Europe to win the race towards the future Internet, EC will support the technologies and system architectures for the Future Internet, and FP7 funds and the ETP’s are considered as important instruments to achieve this.