The Future of Internet
Challenge 1
Results of a workshop organised by the European Commission in Brussels, December 2006
Internet has been extraordinarily successful and is now a critical part of our economy’s infrastructure. However its limitations due to the design made in the seventies start hampering its potential. Evolutionary improvements to the current network will help sustaining up to a point the growth of the Internet, but are not seen as being enough to face the deep rooted weaknesses of Internet as regards mobility, scalability, wireless generalisation, broadband evolution, multiplicity of services, environments and contexts to serve, security and trust to name a few.
The Future of Internet, a foreword by Commissioner Viviane Reding
"Some features will be essential. The internet is and must remain a conduit for pluralism and freedom of expression. Of course this new freedom must be used responsibly and lawfully, but independence and openness is crucial for a future vision of the internet. The security and stability of the internet is also essential. In these respects we must reassert principles of governance that are not only efficient and effective but also open, fair and non-discriminatory."
Why is the future of the internet important and what is the European Commission doing about it?
Indeed the Future Internet should be able to sustain by one or many orders of magnitude higher the number of people, devices and objects connected (billions—perhaps even hundreds of billions of users, sensors, tags, processes, micro controllers), ensure efficiency, security and trust in transaction for new services, incorporate mobility and universal connectivity in its conception, cater for various connectivity schemes, include the technical features for easy operations and management including guarantees for privacy, multiparty governance and delivery of new services.
- If you have only 5 minutes time, here is the summary of the workshop findings.
Trends and ways forward
The Future Internet research activity in ICT in FP7 is largely reflected in the objectives of «Challenge 1» under the 2007-2008 work-programme. Given that the limitations of the Internet are deeply rooted in the architectural design and its protocols and mechanisms, the expected work aims at complementing/revisiting the network science foundations of the Internet, not only for its novel system components like wireless or sensors networks, but aiming at advanced approaches as appropriate to architectures and protocols driven by the need for general mobility, scalability, new forms of routing, connectivity in a generalised wireless environment, to be coupled later with their validation in large scale testing and interconnected environment. The work of exploratory nature is expected to address how various classes of new requirements constrain the foreseeable evolution of the internet and identify the corresponding long term solutions.
In this context Directorate D organised an Information day on the Future of Internet 15 December 2006, in Brussels. The meeting brought together experts from academia and industry, the European Technology Platforms (ETP’s) in the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) area (i.e. eMobility, ISI, NEM and NESSI) and the EIFFEL Future Internet Think Tank.