Information Networking
The Internet is increasingly turning towards information retrieval and dissemination – at least that’s the assertion made by many advocates (including Van Jacobson and others). Much of today’s Internet traffic is largely related to information-centric applications rather than classical endpoint-centric services, such as telephony (probably also due to the fact that telephony has never been the killer app to start with in the Internet). Even server-oriented services like WWW are in reality entrenched with proxy technologies and CDNs (content delivery networks) ala Akamai, breaking up the endpoint-oriented ‘fetching a page from site X’ into a scenario of ‘fetching the content from whatever cache can provide me with a recent copy’.
It is this trend that spurs a new wave (well, not that new) of research projects all around the world. World on flat label routing, RFID technologies, semantic technologies and others are falling into this category. I for myself am involved in a newly created EU project for the new FP7 research framework. Said project investigates the opportunity for a publish-subscribe internetworking routing architecture that (according to the project’s hypothesis) is better suited for contemporary and future applications while introducing new levels of interoperability for today’s silo applications in the world of overlays over IP. I am quite excited about this project, which will hopefully start sometime early 2008 (pending negotiations with the European Commission) and I am sure I will discuss more aspects of it on this blog.
I am also looking into the experimental side of this type of research through investigating and building research support facilities for such type of research activities. This work relates to my involvement in the GENI wireless working group in the US but will involve dedicated efforts within Europe while connecting to the US efforts as well, as much as possible.
How does it all come together? Not for long, that’s for sure since this IS long term research. But there is an overarching vision of a common internetworking that is suitable for bringing together sensor applications seamlessly with media distribution in a myriad of new services not seen before. Many research challenges need to be addressed for this and this blog will certainly touch a few of these in the future.