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The current Internet is an outgrowth of the ARPANET (Advanced Research
Projects Agency Network) that was initiated four decades ago. The TCP/IP
(Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) designed by Vinton Cerf and
Robert Kahn in 1973 did not anticipate, quite understandably, such extensive
use of wireless channels and mobile terminals as we are witnessing today. The
packet-switching technology for the ARPANET was not intended to support
real-time applications that are sensitive to delay jitter. Furthermore, the TCP/IP
designers assumed that its end users – researchers at national laboratories and
universities in the United States, who would exchange their programs, data, and
email – would be trustworthy; thus, security was not their concern, although
reliability was one of the key considerations in the design and operation of the
network.
It is amazing, therefore, that given the age of the TCP/IP, the Internet has
successfully continued to grow by supporting the ever increasing numbers of
end users and new applications, with a series of ad hoc modifications and
extensions made to the original protocol. In recent years, however, many in the
Internet research community began to wonder how long they could continue to
do “patch work” to accommodate new applications and their requirements. New
research initiatives have been launched within the past several years, aimed at a
grand design of “a future Internet.” Such efforts include the NSF’s FIND (Future
Internet Design) and GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovations), the
European Community’s FP 7 (Frame-network Program, Year 7), Germany’s
G-Lab, and Japan’s NWGN (New Generation Network). |
