NETCOM Research Group

Current Internet has become an essential communication infrastructure, not only used for information transfer but also as a key component of social infrastructures such as e-government, energy/traffic controls, finance, learning, health, etc. Even though the Internet has evolved into such an essential infrastructure, its future application depends on how it is going to cope with several concerns on different aspects such as scalability, ubiquity, security, robustness, mobility, heterogeneity, Quality of Service (QoS), re-configurability, context-awareness, manageability, data-centric, economics, etc. Over the last years a discussion about how to overcome upcoming Internet's limitations has been initiated. From an academic point of view, one could incline for a revolutionary or clean-slate way of solving the problem by fully redesigning the overall Internet architecture. From a more practical point of view, one tends to incline for an evolution of the current Internet as it is by patching its leaks and deficiencies when trying to serve as the basis for the development of novel services demanding constricting requirements.

This project will tackle the Future of Internet from both perspectives (revolutionary and evolutionary) in order to understand the benefits and disadvantages of each approach and be able to compare them. Additionally, the project will take into account solutions thought to improve three important lacks of the current Internet: energy efficiency, heterogeneity of information and coexistence of networks. In order to do so, two technologies have been identified as potential solutions to some of these problems: i) Media Independence and ii) Virtualization. On the one hand, Media Independence enables the decoupling of physical and overlay infrastructure by introducing an abstraction layer between link and network layers. On the other hand Virtualization enables the creation of overlay networks spanning multiple technologies and realms, hence being a very useful tool for context-aware service composition.