Tells you what's happening in Telecommunications around the world

The Internet has grown from a small experiment into a collaborative network with more than 1.6 billion users today. From a simple means of communication among computers, the Internet, coupled with the spread of broadband, has emerged as a fundamental part of modern society. In addition, the Internet has gone mobile with devices already used by millions of people, and potentially billions. According to analysts Nielsen Mobile, the number of people surfing the Internet on mobile phones has doubled since 2006 — and some predict that by 2012 there will be more wireless Internet users than wired. This is especially true for developing countries, and the Internet must meet the needs of those users.

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Meanwhile, the deployment of higher speed mobile Internet access in developed countries continues apace, alongside the launch of smartphones. And increasingly, sensors are being added to networks. This is extending the system to objects that are fitted with radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, creating an Internet of things.

On top of all these networks and devices lies a vast array of applications that range from YouTube and Facebook to e-commerce, e-government, e-education and e-health.

To meet the demands of new applications, services and users, and to fulfil its role as a vital part of national and global infrastructure, the Internet is continually evolving. But is the underlying architecture robust enough to continue adapting to evergrowing demands?

ITU’s Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU–T) issued its tenth Technology Watch Report^* in April 2009 entitled “The Future Internet”. It examines the debate over the Internet architecture and provides pointers for future standards work within ITU–T and the broader standards community.

Framing the debate

The existing architecture of the Internet dates back to the 1970s and was designed to create simplified network and implementation protocols, guided by concepts such as layering and packet switching. Among the goals of this architecture are connection of existing networks; cost-effectiveness; survivability; support of multiple types of services; accommodation of a variety of physical networks, and allowing distributed management and resource accountability

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To cope with the unforeseen spread of the Internet and new applications, various solutions have been found that are seen by some observers as temporary “patches”. There have been periodic calls to purge the Internet of the accumulation of such patches and to adopt a radical “clean-slate” approach. Those who hold this view contend that an “Internet of the future” should be created on a new architecture that would offer better security. In contrast, others say that the existing architecture should be allowed to continue to evolve.

The evolutionary view

The evolutionary view is that the Internet should continue as it has over the past decade, with targeted patches being added to fix problems as they emerge. To meet the challenges of disruptive technologies, one suggested solution is the use of overlay networks that can provide performance and reliability without competing with existing infrastructure. This position is based on the view that the Internet is now fully commercial and the investments by operators and individuals make an evolutionary approach essential. In any case, firms that have invested billions of dollars will ensure that the current form of the Internet survives and prospers. It has also been pointed out that the original architecture has already shown that it can be adapted to new services and applications that were not imagined when the Internet began.

Some supporters of the evolutionary view say that such common problems as security and spam are not the result of architecture. In a presentation at the Internet Governance Forum in Hyderabad, India, in December 2008, Bob Kahn, one of the original creators of the Internet, proposed new standards for “digital object architecture”, to enable better information flows across the Internet. He contends that this would address the problems, but keep the basic architecture intact.

The clean-slate approach

The proposal to start anew with a different architecture was put dramatically by Professor Dave Clark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, who served as the Internet’s chief protocol architect during much of the 1980s. In an article entitled “The Internet is Broken” published in 2005, he wrote that “the Net’s basic flaws cost firms billions, impede innovation, and threaten national security. It’s time for a clean-slate approach.”

A number of initiatives are already under way to reinvent the Internet in this way. Among the major challenges being addressed in these efforts are security and privacy; resistance to distributed denial of service attacks; end-to-end quality of service and quality of experience; mobility; reliability; addressing, and identity.

The United States, for example, has provided government funding for projects on Internet design, such as that of the US National Science Foundation (NSF), which has invested around USD 20 million in two projects: the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI) and Future Internet Design (FIND). The GENI vision is to create a national facility to explore radical design for future global networking infrastructure, based on people and content.

Another initiative is the interdisciplinary Clean Slate Internet Design Program by Stanford University in the United States, launched in March 2007 to “reinvent the Internet”. It is predicated on two questions: “With what we know today, if we were to start again with a clean slate, how would we design a global communications infrastructure?” and “How should the Internet look in 15 years from now? It is supported by industry partners such as Cisco Systems, Deutsche Telekom, NTT DoCoMo, NEC and Xilinx, as well as the United States National Science Foundation.

In Japan, the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology has launched the Akari programme to develop a “new generation” of network architecture by 2015–2020. The aim is to find an ideal solution starting from a clean slate, unimpeded by existing constraints. Major initiatives under the European Union’s Framework Programmes for technological development include the think-tank Evolved Internet Future for European Leadership (EIFFEL), established by a group of researchers in 2006, and the Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE) project. FIRE is focused on exploring “new and radically better technological solutions for the future Internet”, while preserving its current advantages of openness, freedom of expression and ubiquitous access.

Meeting future needs: the key trends

Meanwhile, several trends are shaping the future demands to be placed on the Internet’s architecture and design. These include powerful search engines, social networks, online media and mobile access. The Technology Watch Report points to mobile Internet access, Web 2.0 and cloud computing as emerging trends to be considered by the ITU–T membership in its future standards work. The report underlines that the growing popularity of cloud computing as a business model will place further strains on the Internet, particularly with regard to security, reliability and cost of access. ITU published a Technology Watch Report on cloud computing in March 2009 (see ITU News of April 2009).

Progress in 3G and 4G

ITU’s Radiocommunication Sector (ITU–R) continues its work, in partnership with organizations in the wireless mobile broadband industry, to harmonize the advances being made in third-generation (3G) and 3.5G wireless technologies known as time division multiple access (TDMA), code division multiple access (CDMA) and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA). In their latest versions, these technologies offer very significant improvements in throughput, performance and overall user experience. Using an all-IP packet-based network, they enable operators to reduce the number of network elements between subscribers and the Internet. Higher speeds and increased support of full mobile broadband will allow the end user to run applications and services that are associated today with wired broadband networks.

To set the stage for the new wireless future, in 2003 ITU–R provided a strategic vision called IMTAdvanced, and a plan and related standards are in place to achieve it. IMT-Advanced (or 4G) is a leap beyond IMT-2000 (or 3G), as it offers new capabilities for the physical layer of the radio interface and brings into play better management and control of radio resources, advanced capabilities for spectrum channel and bandwidth aggregation, and improved performance at all levels, including quality of service (see the December 2008 issue of ITU News).

The Internet of services

The Internet of services (IOS) is another area that has been very successful. The best known class of services is e-commerce, with such leading firms as eBay and Amazon. The importance of searching and of the related advertising revenues enabled the growth of Google. Similarly, the development of social networking saw Facebook and its competitors grow rapidly. Now location-based services, such as those that tell you where your friends are, or where to find a suitable local restaurant, are expected to extend social networking systems to mobile devices. The problem for network design has been the unpredictable nature of the successes (and failures) of services, making it difficult to know the nature and levels of traffic they will generate.

Internet and television

Already, in some countries, people spend more time online than watching television. As the Internet encroaches on the market share and advertising revenues of traditional broadcast media, new technologies are emerging to facilitate Internet viewing over television sets.

For instance, the electronics manufacturer LG, of the Republic of Korea, recently introduced a television set that allows wireless Internet viewing. Chip maker Intel is partnering with Yahoo to produce a widget that lets television viewers send e-mails, trade shares or check the weather while watching programmes.

New web technologies

New web technologies may change the nature of data fl ows and searches on the Internet. An example is the “semantic web” that has been described by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, as the “web of the future”. It would allow any item, such as a photo or a bank statement, to be linked to any other. Instead of a collection of pages, the semantic web would enable direct connectivity between much lower-level pieces of information, giving rise to new services. However, it would also raise new privacy and security challenges.

Internet islands

It has been widely observed that the open, transparent nature of the Internet is one of the key reasons for its success and its global reach. But there are concerns that the global system could break up into “islands” or that some parts could be closed off, due in large part to security concerns.

Professor Jonathan Zitrain of Harvard Law School in the United States has warned that we face a wholesale revision of the Internet and personal computer environment of the past 30 years. “The change is coming partly because of the need to address security problems peculiar to open technologies, and partly because businesses want more control over the experience that customers have with their products.” He adds that “the trend from open systems towards closed ones threatens the culture of serendipitous tinkering that has given us the web, instant messaging, peer-to-peer networking, Skype, Wikipedia and a host of other innovations”.

Others refer to the possibility of the Internet becoming a “gated community”, where users may have to sacrifice certain freedoms and anonymity in return for better security. This is already the case for many corporate and government Internet users.

Will there be traffic jams?

The rapid growth of the Internet has placed new demands on communication networks. New technologies that generate large quantities of traffic include video-sharing sites, videoconferencing, movie downloads, online gaming, remote medical imaging and online storage of documents.

Some claim that the Internet will collapse under the weight of traffic. A recent study by analysts Nemertes Research concludes that, by 2012, demand will exceed total broadband capacity at the access layer of the Internet and will require investment of some USD 137 billion over the next five years to keep pace.

Other observers consider that the growth will be manageable, largely due to declining unit costs. Andrew Odlyzko, a computer scientist at the University of Minnesota, United States, estimated that Internet traffic in 2007 was between three and five exabytes worldwide (an exabyte is 1018, or a quintillion, bytes). This represented an annual growth of 50–60 per cent — down from 100 per cent in prior years, indicating that the rate of growth is slowing. TeleGeography Research has published figures showing that between 2007 and 2008, capacity grew faster than traffic.

Conclusion

The existing architecture of the Internet has proved to be capable of permitting the creation and rapid expansion of such features of modern life as eBay, Google, YouTube, Skype and Facebook. Despite some critics, evolutionary changes to the original design have been adequate to meet most new needs. The next few years are likely to see further deployment of IP over mobile networks and, in developed countries, over fibre-to-the-home.

However, security concerns and rising cybercrime lend support to calls for a clean-slate approach to the future Internet. The evolutionary approach is ongoing, but will there be a tipping point that would favour a move to a clean slate? Only time will tell.

* The Future Internet and all previous ITU–T Technology Watch Reports can be downloaded at www.itu.int/ITU-T/techwatch. These reports are prepared by the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (TSB).