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

The Devil is in the Details

[suso]

Appearently, using HTML for documents is still a major challenge.

It only takes one person or company to implement things wrong, break protocol and then you have a mess. That is the grand challenge.

Are you sure

[elid]

that this isn't one of those randomly generated MIT papers?

My challenge

[Anonymous Coward]

this document tries to imagine what will be like packet-switching was for the past 15 years.

I'm trying to imagine what this sentence means.. and it might take me 10-15 years.

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

Re:Are we talking about the US of A?

[Beatbyte]

That's my point. Your excuse is distance. My point is, I don't care. I want speed. We need to quit focusing so much effort on making LAN's faster and focus on WAN/Internet connections.

As far "teh intarweb" you speak of... nope, I don't think it runs on "100BTX Ethernet cable".. I've been in the ISP business for 10 years now and I'm pretty familiar with both ends of the Internet. The first being the provider end. The second, being the customer's end. Considering the customers pay my bills, I'm more worried about providing them with what they want.

IPv6

[Anonymous Coward]

The biggest challenge will be moving the entire internet onto IPv6

Advanced interconnectivity for inter-personal comm

[mekkab]

We need to improve interpersonal communication via computer internetworking. And until Punch You In The Face over Ethernet (PYITFoE) is widely available, we will only ever scratch the surface of the rich tapestry of human interaction.

WQos, .mil, trusted computing, etc.

[G4from128k]

A few ideas:

1. QoS: The wider use of quality-of-service metrics to regulate bandwidth/latency/drop-rate will spread from backbone to the backplane. QoS will be assigned not just to packets or network streams, but extended to applications, processes, and threads.
   
2. authentication-intensive network: Anti-spam, anti-phish, anti-piracy initiatives will deanonymize the network. Expanding liability may force commercial providers of network infrastructure to adopt so-called trusted computing initiatives. Counterfeiting a header may become crime similar to counterfeiting money because both crimes degrade the public trust in the system.
   
3. militarization of networks: When will network security become so important to the national interest that the government deploys .mil computers to DDoS offending servers. If the economy runs on the net, someone will become the defender of that infrastructure.
   
4. physical layer/application layer dichotomy: Currently the value of the network is in the application, but the cost is in the physical layer. This lead to the problem of price wars among infrastructure service provider or the war over municipal wifi. Perhaps an alternate approach would more closely link the value and costs of networking.
   
5. Multiple IPs per device: I wonder if the move to multiple cores will push systems toward multiple IPv6 addys per machine. Technologies such as IBM's cell architecture support the potential for multiple OSes running on a single hardware platform. With such a large IPv6 address space, it may be easier to give each running OS instance its own IP address, rather than try to share an address and try to use a meta OS to share network resources. This, in turn, may lead to a proliferation of addresses that fill the larger space.