The Future Internet November 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," I wrote 11/27/06.

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 generalization and security.

• Connecting people
• Connecting devices
• Connecting objects
  
• The user generated content revolution
• Information day about the future Internet
  

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, etc. ), ensure efficiency, security and trust in transaction for new services, incorporate mobility and universal connectivity in its conception, include the technical features for easy operations and management including guarantees for privacy, multi party governance and delivery of new services .

• ICT in FP7
• The first call will be early 2007
  

The Future Internet research activity in ICT in FP7 is part of challenge 1 and the first call will be early 2007.

Given that the limitations of the Internet are deeply rooted in the architectural design and its protocols and mechanisms, the expected work aims at revisiting the network science foundations of the Internet,

• not only in its novel system components like wireless or sensors networks ,
• but aiming at advanced approaches to architectures and protocols,
  
• driven by the need for general mobility, scalability, new forms of routing, c
• onnectivity in a generalised wireless environment,
• to be coupled later with their validation in large scale testing and interconnected environment.
  

The work of exploratory nature will address how various classes of new requirements constrain the foreseeable evolution of the internet and identify the corresponding long term solutions.

The objective of this information day is to present and discuss views and understandings of which and how long term research could address the challenges for Europe.