Future Internet

Future Internet is a general term for research activities on new architectures for the Internet.

While the technical development of the Internet was an extensive research topic from the beginning, an increased public awareness of several critical shortcomings in terms of performance, reliability, scalability, security and many other categories including societal, economical and business aspects, led to future Internet research efforts. The time horizon of future Internet studies is typically long term, taking several years before significant deployments take place.

Approaches towards a future Internet range from small, incremental evolutionary steps to complete redesigns (clean slate) and architecture principles, where the applied technologies shall not be limited by existing standards or paradigms such as client server networking, which, for example, might evolve into co-operative peer structures. The fact that an IP address denotes both the identifier as well as the locator of an end system, sometimes referred to as semantic overload, is an example of a conceptual shortcoming of the architecture. Approaches called "clean slate" are based on experience that supplementary or late additions to an original and established design are limited in their acceptance and introduction. Technical examples for evolutionary approaches include supplements to existing Internet technology, such as differentiated services, reliable server pooling, SCTP, , Site Multihoming by IPv6 Intermediation or Internet Protocol version 6.

Non-technical aspects of a future Internet span large areas such as socio-economics, business and environmental issues. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development held a conference called "Shaping Policies for a Digital World" in 2008. It proposed activities such as publishing recommendations for the future of the Internet economy.

Research areas that could be seen as components of a future Internet include network management,network virtualization, and treating any kind of information as objects, independent of their storage or location.

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