Starting in mid-1990s, the advent of mobility, wireless communications and the web substantially shifted Internet usage and communication paradigms. This accentuated long-term concerns about present Internet architecture and prompted interest in alternative designs. Meanwhile, many practical workarounds have been found to cater for explosive demand. These workarounds raise cost and complexity unnecessarily —actually, they make matters worse. The overall situation has accumulated into a huge technical debt that is again circumvented in fragile ways, contributing significantly to the ossification of the internet. Now we do not only need to upgrade the original technology , but we need to also mitigate the damage caused by clever workarounds that became less temporary than anticipated.
Thus, the ultimate goal of ‘NGI-POINTER’ is to change the underlying fabric of the internet and the web, by supporting promising bottom up projects that are able to build, on top of state-of-the-art research, scalable protocols and tools to assist in the practical transition or migration to new or updated technologies, whilst keeping European Values at the core.
At the heart of the NGI is an architectural evolution that improves upon legacy core protocols of the internet. Such architectural changes will have to be introduced in a way that do not unnecessarily break anything. The complexity of designing a successful architecture upgrade is easily illustrated by the fact that over half of the lifetime of the internet has already been spent on the (arguably not very successful) move away from IPv4. Given the diversity of use cases of today’s internet, there are diverging design considerations and (potentially non-overlapping) solution spaces for different challenges which need to be investigated. Adoption of new protocols can leave room for complementary solutions to cater for different circumstances and different trade-offs (for instance between resilience, scalability and energy efficiency).
Significant effort will have to go into understanding and mitigating the many practical aspects of potential transition from the current internet. Architecture renovation is widely recognised as critically important for the long term, and can provide structural solutions to problems that can only be partially mitigated within the current architecture – and at significant cost.
In such a context, ‘NGI-POINTER’ will scout and support European-based ‘internet talents’ in developing and providing new marketable solutions, backed in state-of-the-art technology and research, that provide alternative and/or auxiliary tools and protocols with specific value propositions for society and/or self-sustainable Business Models for specific use case areas related with internet architecture renovation such as: Privacy-by-design; Internet of Things; Network optimization; Virtualization and isolation; Limitations in the TCP/IP protocol suite; eCommerce security; Autonomous Network operations and control; Energy Efficiency (see section 1.4. for further details). As ‘internet talents’ we will consider researchers from outstanding research groups as well as organisation and individuals with outstanding track records and with links to internet governance bodies and/or open source communities that are owners of the internet renovation problems of today. We will call these internet talents, hereinafter, ‘NGI architects’.
Thus, ‘NGI-POINTER’ will support the emergence of a New Generation of Internet tools developed by “NGI architects” towards a higher efficiency, scalability, security and resilience in the evolution of internet architecture. We will do so by supporting NGI architects in creating highly innovative products that turn the results of the scientific research from universities, research centres and developer communities into scalable and marketable products or services.
We will target, especially, those talented and outstanding profiles that are not being supported today by public programs for Research and Innovation due to the administrative burden and/or the bias effect towards certain groups of applicants in grant evaluation. Moreover, we will guarantee transparency and trustworthiness of the selection and follow up process by using an Open Call Management System backed in Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT).
‘NGI-POINTER’ aims to find ambitious “NGI architects” to change the underlying fabric of the internet and the web, by supporting promising bottom up projects that are able to build, on top of state-of-the-art research, scalable protocols and tools to assist in the practical transition or migration to new or updated technologies, whilst keeping European Values at the core.
