Grand Challenges in Networks for the Next 15 Years

jameshowison writes "Some of the researchers responsible for the Internet, including Bob Branden of ISI and David D Clark from MIT, have outlined what they see as the grand challenges for internetworking and computation in the next 10-15 years (PDF). The report from the IRTF's 'End-to-End Research Group' discussed the question, 'How might the computing and communications world be materially different in 10 to 15 years' and how do we get there? From a universal system for location, to small-area networks, to operation in time of crisis, software radio and an agenda to reduce the energy required for communications this document tries to imagine what will be like packet-switching was for the past 15 years."

Comments

Ubiquitous, seamless, personalized spam

[Animats]

The major Internet applications, by volume, are spam, piracy, and advertising. This trend will continue. By 2020, 98% of all Internet traffic will be illegal in some way.

Are we talking about the US of A?

[Beatbyte]

Because it's still going to be the WAN from LAN network that we'll be working on forever.

I've got a LAN setup running 200x as fast as the fastest WAN/Internet connection readily available (minus a special order and uber expensive DS3). And at the pace we're going, the US is getting slower and slower as far as the Internet connections go.

Right now I can completely rewire my office and home for $5k with state of the art, high end network components and have it done in less than a week. I can't get close to those speeds with my net connection for 4x that price ($20k/year).

That being said, there is still hope somewhere

Location technology

[jessecurry]

The little section about location technology was very interesting. I love using my GPS, it has opened up a new sport to me and allows me to do some very interesting things, but I am bothered by the fact that it only works outdoors. Having a GPS-like systems that worked everywhere will be very cool, and integration with existing devices might bring the "smart home" I've been hearing about for the past 15 years into reality.
The one part missing from my home automation system is the ability to autonomously process input. I have to use a remote control for events that aren't based on a repeating schedule. It would be nice to be able to walk into a room and have my wrist watch alert my automation server as to my whereabouts, then have the lighting dynamically adjust to me.

Van Jacobson?

[Anonymous Coward]

It appears as co-author

Wasn't he dead?

Re:IPv6 isn't a big deal

[billstewart]

IPv6 is useful, and at some point we'll need the address space, but basically until Cisco and Juniper make routers that perform well using IPv6, nobody feels motivated to move wholesale - almost half the IPv4 space is still unused.. Microsoft is doing a bunch of IPv6 work that'll help the chicken&egg problem in a couple of years, but without a killer app, there's no real motivation.

The big problem I've seen with IPv6 is that its goals not only included bigger address space, which we've been able to slack off by using RFC1918 private space, firewalls, and NAT, but it also promised to do Really Cool Things to make routing infrastructures more scalable and better behaved, and that doesn't appear to have panned out yet. That means that not only do routing tables get bigger because the addresses are longer (which you fix by waiting for a couple of year's of Moore's Law to fix memory pricing), but there's likely to be a repeat of the "IPv4 Class C Address Swamp" which nobody wants, or the "Upstream-Provider Non-Portable Address Space Lock-In" features which customers don't like, and which makes multi-homing for reliability much harder. And that doesn't seem to have been done yet.