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NSF Ponders New And Improved Internet
diorcc wrote to mention a Wired article about a NSF Project that could completely rebuild the Internet as we know it. From the article: "The National Science Foundation is backing a major initiative that could lead to a completely new internet architecture, with built-in security measures and support for ubiquitous sensors and wireless communications devices, among other things. The Global Environment for Networking Investigations, or GENI, will include a research grant program to fund new architectures and an experimental facility, which has not yet been planned in detail."
So in other words, this is just an experimental research facility with possible long-term finds that may impact the future direction of interneworking.
To rebuild the internet is insane. To slowly change the direction we are building it is more likely.
First off, there are a number of major challenges facing the Internet. The ones that spring immediately to mind are security, management, and availability. To see some of these, compare the Internet to the (good parts of) the telephone network. 911 emergency phone service has roughly 99.99% availability; the Internet is an order of magnitude worse. You can't get a virus over the phone lines, and it's very difficult to create a botnet of 100,000 people to DDoS, say, a hospital's telephone system. Now, that ignores many of the good things about the Internet -- you can create and run fabulous applications that the network designers never envisioned, etc., at least, if you're not running behind a NAT. ;)
But wouldn't it be nice to have a network that had the best of all worlds? A network that cost 1/10th as much to manage as it does today? A network where your parents didn't call you up frequently and ask, "It says it couldn't find my DHCP server - what's wrong??" A network where you didn't resort to weird (but clever) hacks like traceroute to try to diagnose problems? Where Scott Richter couldn't create a spam-blasting army of drones? I use Vonage, and I had to dial 911 a few weeks ago to report a fire at the apartment across the street. During part of the conversation, I couldn't hear the operator well enough to understand the questions she was asking. It was a frightening and educational experience.
One of the most important parts of this program is that it's encouraging researchers to not feel constrained to fit into the current design, and is looking at ways to get that deployed in a way that it can gateway to or run on top of the current Internet. There's a big difference between this program and the Internet2, IPv6, etc. It's both higher risk and (hopefully!) higher reward. Internet2 was pretty much "Internet + faster links + some focused researchy bits"; it got co-oped early on because it provided lots of bandwidth to big science, and was too entrenched to try radical new things that (gasp!) might break. GENI is research + interfaces to allow early adopters -- like, say, slashdotters -- to make use of its services. The idea of creating an infrastructure that can safely be used simultaneously for testing out new research prototypes at all levels and running production versions of those services that succeed is a powerful notion that will give GENI a big edge over prior attempts.
It's an exciting proposal, and a scary one. If it gets funded, it could be either the biggest success in networking since the Web, or the biggest flop.
(Disclosure- I'm a networking professor at Carnegie Mellon. This is my field, I've been involved in some of the GENI discussions, and I intend to submit funding proposals to it. I think it'll be one of the best things in years to help academic networking research have a big impact on the real world.)
For the applications we need on I2, we need low latency. Would you want to do a teleoperation with 100ms ping times? Imagine a surgeon doing a teleoperation and he started slicing and the machine had to wait for the packets to be resent to complete it on a congested network? Would it stop and then cut deeper causing a major blood loss or puncture? We needed big pipes with low latency and fewer hops to do anything of meaning or reliability.
With regard to applications, when we were first hooked up to I2 we were doing 5mb/s video classrooms to three other institutions. That's 15mb/s to each school. No way we could have done that with commodity internet, qos was just a twinkle in somebody's eye then, and with that it would have been choppy at best.
We use I2 for video conferencing, large physics data, multi-university distance education, digital libraries, database replication and disaster recovery, and others too numerous to mention.
So I2/Abilene was not really about the network so much as the applications that run on it. If it were not there, many of the things we take for granted at our university would not be possible.