What will the Net look like in 2020?
Photo via flickr the waving cat
According to Network World, we won’t recognize the Internet in 10 years. Computer scientists are re-thinking everything.
The National Science Foundation’s Network Technology and System (NeTS) program plans to select anywhere from two to four large-scale research projects to receive grants worth as much as $9 million each to prototype future Internet architectures with bids due first quarter 2010. The challenge is for researchers to come up with ideas that are more secure and more available for everyone: managing user’s identities, embracing wireless optical technologies; consideration of societal impacts.
The Internet research projects chosen for prototyping will run on a new virtual networking lab being built by BBN Technologies. The lab is dubbed GENI for the Global Environment for Network Innovations. The GENI program has developed experimental network infrastructure that’s being installed in U.S. universities. This infrastructure will allow researchers to run large-scale experiments of new Internet architectures in parallel with —but separated from — the day-to-day traffic running on today’s Internet.
Following are 2 experimental projects:
OPPORTUNISTIC NETWORKS
Researchers from Howard University in Washington, D.C. will be experimenting with a new type of mobile wireless network on the GENI platform called Opportunistic Networks. Opportunistic networks would use peer-to-peer communications to transfer communications if the network is unavailable. For example, you may want to send an e-mail from a car in a remote location without network access. With an opportunistic wireless network, your PDA might send that message to a device inside a passing vehicle, which might take the message to a nearby cell tower. Opportunistic mobile networks would be useful for emergency response if the network infrastructure is wiped out by a disaster or is unavailable for a period of time, or for developing countries such as India, which isn’t by traditional wireless infrastructure such as cell towers.
DAVIS SOCIAL LINKS
Davis Social Links is an architecture based on social networking that was developed at the University of California at Davis.
Davis Social Links uses the format of Facebook — with its friends-based ripple effect of connectivity — to propagate connections on the Internet. That’s how it creates connections based on trust and true identities, according to S. Felix Wu, a professor in the Computer Science Department at UC Davis.
“If somebody sends you an e-mail, the only information you have about whether this e-mail is valuable is to look at the sender’s e-mail which can be faked and then look at the content,” Wu says. “If you could provide the receiver of the e-mail with the social relationship with the sender, this will actually help the receiver to set up certain policies about whether the message should be higher or lower priority.”
Also, the social control layer interface under Davis Social Links is like a social version of Google. You type some keywords…and the social Google will give you a list of pointers to some of the social content matching the keywords and the social path to that content.
via Network World