MIT Technology Review is running a three-part piece called "The Internet Is Broken" (read part 1 here). It’s about David D. Clark’s pessimistic view of the future of the Internet.
Over the years, as Internet applications proliferated -- wireless devices, peer-to-peer file-sharing, telephony -- companies and network engineers came up with ingenious and expedient patches, plugs, and workarounds. The result is that the originally simple communications technology has become a complex and convoluted affair. For all of the Internet's wonders, it is also difficult to manage and more fragile with each passing day.
That's why Clark argues that it's time to rethink the Internet's basic architecture, to potentially start over with a fresh design -- and equally important, with a plausible strategy for proving the design's viability, so that it stands a chance of implementation. "It's not as if there is some killer technology at the protocol or network level that we somehow failed to include," says Clark. "We need to take all the technologies we already know and fit them together so that we get a different overall system. This is not about building a technology innovation that changes the world but about architecture -- pulling the pieces together in a different way to achieve high-level objectives."
Fortunately the National Science Foundation is working on a long range research plan; its Networking Technology and Systems (NeTS) program is soliciting proposals in four research areas:
I. Programmable Wireless Networks (ProWiN): Funded projects will seek to exploit the capabilities of programmable radios to make more effective use of the frequency spectrum and to improve wireless network connectivity.
II. Networking of Sensor Systems (NOSS): Funded projects will seek to create architectures, tools, algorithms and systems that make it easy to assemble and configure networks of sensor systems.
III. Networking Broadly Defined (NBD): Funded projects will include a balance of theoretical and experimental research and/or education projects that expand our understanding of large, complex, heterogeneous networks, design of access and core networks based on emerging wireless and optical technologies, and continue the evolution of Internet.
IV. Future Internet Design (FIND): Funded projects will seek to design a next-generation Internet which we will call the "Future Internet" from core functionalities to designing for security and robustness, manageability, utility and social need, new computing paradigms, integration of new network technologies, higher-level service architectures, and new theories of network architecture.
Next to that, reconfiguring the Internet doesn't seem too hard.
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