by François Baccelli and Jon Crowcroft

The Internet has become critical to everyday life in domains as diverse as education, health, defence, commerce, travel and entertainment. The Internet was not designed for its current level of usage, and there is a need for simple constructs to allow the network to do better in terms of security, mobility and quality of service, among other things.

by Dirk Trossen

The EIFFEL support action has been designed to mobilize European researchers to discuss and debate the future of the Internet, thereby helping to develop a functional networked society for the future.

by Emmanuel Baccelli, Thomas H. Clausen and Philippe Jacquet

The Internet Engineering Task Force was the birthplace of today's Internet. Understanding its activities is necessary for individuals and institutions who wish to anticipate the future of the Internet. As things stand, this necessity is not likely to fade any time soon.

by Anja Feldmann, Mario Kind, Olaf Maennel, Gregor Schaffrath and Christoph Werle

While the Internet is currently viewed as widely successful for some of its participants, namely the users and service providers such as Google, it also suffers from ossification in the underlying infrastructure. The ossification has multiple causes, among them the fact that since the Internet works quite well as it is, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have no incentive to change their ways. Moreover, ISPs suffer from a lack of business perspective due to the predominant charging modi for Internet access: flat rates for users and a combined price model consisting of a base rate and usage-based component for content providers. An additional complication is that traffic grows at a higher rate than that at which the network equipment costs decrease.

by Glenford Mapp

Y-Comm is a new communications architecture that will meet the challenge of providing ubiquitous heterogeneous communication on a global scale. This new Internet will provide continuous connectivity by the seamless operation of multiple mobile networks that will simultaneously be accessible by mobile nodes. It will also provide transparent support for quality of service (QoS), fostering the development of new kinds of applications. Finally, it will provide built-in multi-layer security.

by Laurent Massoulié

At the Thomson Research Lab in Paris, epidemic algorithms are being investigated. These algorithms are expected to have a strong impact on the dissemination of media content over the Internet, notably in peer-to-peer systems for live streaming applications.

by Pavel Minařík

The MyNetScope development project is an example of academic and business cooperation resulting in a platform for advanced network traffic processing, analysis and visualization. MyNetScope overcomes the barrier of traffic content by focusing on traffic characteristics and behaviour patterns and targets the intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDS/IPS) segment of this century.

by Felix Strohmeier, Martin Nilsson and Demetres Antoniades

Optimizing control, management and flexibility of future network infrastructures requires a good understanding of network and application behaviour. The FP7 project MOMENT (Monitoring and Measurement in the Next-Generation Technologies) combines a diversity of data sources, enriches them with semantic information, and presents them via a unified interface in a user-friendly way.

by Peter Dorfinger, Carsten Schmoll and Felix Strohmeier

Collecting information as required for network operation also gathers personal information from users sending their data over the network. Existing network-monitoring applications do not take user privacy into consideration by design. We present a framework that allows these applications to operate in a privacy-preserving environment.

by Marc Stevens

When weaknesses are found in cryptographic protocols or algorithms on which the everyday security of the Internet relies, it is important that they are replaced by more secure alternatives. This is clearly emphasized by the recent case of MD5, an algorithm commonly used to create digital signatures in which severe weaknesses were found in 2004. The continued use of MD5 by several leading Certification Authorities (CAs) on the Internet enabled our team to become a rogue CA itself, triggering quick and adequate responses from the affected CAs and major Internet browsers.

by David Hutchison and James P.G. Sterbenz

The ResiliNets initiative is an umbrella for a number of projects in resilient future Internet architecture. It aims to understand and improve the resilience and survivability of computer networks, including the Internet.

by Bostjan Pintar, Axel Rennoch, Peter Schmitting and Stephan Schulz

Future telecommunication networks will use Internet technology. The European Telecommunication Standardization Institute (ETSI) is developing a standardized test infrastructure to enable industry to provide high-quality open telecommunication services. The testware is based on the Testing and Test Control Notation (TTCN-3) that has been successfully deployed worldwide in a variety of industrial domains.

by Freek Dijkstra, Jeroen van der Ham and Ronald van der Pol

Setting up high-speed network connections – light paths – is still a manual effort taking two to three weeks. The network engineers need a clear picture of the network topology in order to plan and configure light paths. The Network Markup Language (NML) standardizes network topology and state information. The University of Amsterdam and SARA Computing & Networking Services in the Netherlands are contributing to this effort, with the ultimate goal being to automatically set up and manage light paths.

by Nikolaos Laoutaris and Pablo Rodriguez

From its conception the Internet has been a communication network, meaning its development has been driven by the assumption that connections and data transfers are sensitive to delay. Spatial optimization in the form of routing has therefore been the main tool for improving services offered by the network. Temporal optimization, in the form of scheduling, has been limited to millisecond-second scales and aligned with the requirements of interactive delay-sensitive traffic. In recent years however, the network has been progressively shifting from communication to content dissemination. Unlike communication, content dissemination can often tolerate much larger delays, eg in the order of hours. This higher tolerance to delay allows scheduling to go beyond congestion avoidance. Here, we briefly illustrate how to use store-and-forward scheduling to perform bulk data transfers that may be impossible or, under current pricing schemes for bandwidth, prohibitively expensive.

by Henrik Abrahamsson and Per Kreuger

As part of the SICS Center for Networked Systems we investigate new and efficient ways of distributing television over the Internet Protocol.

by Marco Pellegrini

Imagine that searching for videos by specifying visual content is as easy as searching for Web pages by specifying keywords (as is done with search engines like Google and Yahoo). This is the Holy Grail of video searching by content. In the Internet of the Future (IOF), architectural support for multimedia will be influenced by new user-centric search paradigms. The VISTO project is a step towards this goal.

by Daniel Schall and Schahram Dustdar

In most cases, service-oriented architecture is realized using Web services technology. At the Vienna University of Technology, we have implemented a platform enabling humans to provide services. We foresee important applications that will be based on Human-Provided Services and software services.

by Pau Giner, Carlos Cetina, Joan Fons and Vicente Pelechano

The Internet of Things envisions real-world environments that are augmented with digital services. With ever greater numbers of devices being added to our surroundings, simplicity is greatly appreciated by users. With the purpose of preventing service behaviour from becoming overwhelming, our project is devoted to dynamically organizing services according to user needs.

by Thomas Luckenbach, Mario Schuster and Marc-Oliver Pahl

Next-generation home networking environments will contain a variety of Internet-ready devices or embedded systems, which will result in increased complexity for the end user. New methods are therefore required to build autonomic networking infrastructures that enable auto-configuration and self-management of the networked elements and keep technical details hidden from the user.

by Lennart E. Fahlén

The combination of ambient/ubiquitous interface technology and Internet-based energy load-balancing tools with a consumer focus, holds promise for increased energy savings and control.

by Markus Miche and Thomas Michael Bohnert

The commercial introduction of broadband wireless communication technology such as UMTS or WiMAX facilitates the connection of vehicles with the Internet and hence with a broad range of service providers. It thus paves the way for the second generation of telematic services, which is referred to as Vehicle-to-Business communication. It allows for the enhancement of existing enterprise applications as well as the identification and realization of novel business models, but requires an appropriate infrastructure on top of the aforementioned communication technology. This article presents an integration architecture with which to realize an efficient and secure information exchange between vehicles and back-end services, and points out the potential of the Internet of Vehicles.

by Zsolt Kemény and Elisabeth Ilie-Zudor

A substantial number of the challenges to be tackled by the future Internet are posed by collaborative communities such as supply chains or production networks, where massive amounts of product-related information are shared in a selective and secure manner. One of the key application areas in this domain is tracking and tracing, ie, keeping track of production-related entities of interest and their interaction with identifiable objects in their environment. The international project TraSer – Identity-based Tracking and Web Services for SMEs – addresses research and development efforts in this area.

by Gregoris Mentzas and Keith Popplewell

A challenge for enterprise systems in the future Internet of services is to address the sharing of knowledge in virtual organizations. SYNERGY has developed a service-oriented solution for knowledge-based collaboration in such virtual organizations.

by Socrates Varakliotis, Peter Kirstein and Steve Hailes

Telecommunications and information exchange are vital to the operation of emergency response units. The objective of the U-2010 project team is to use existing or future telecommunication infrastructure to provide the most capable means of communication and the most effective access to information to all the parties required to act in case of accident, incident, catastrophe or crisis. We are feeding our experiences with the technology involved in this area into the discussion on the future Internet.

by Tanja Zseby and Thomas Hirsch

Several future Internet solutions introduce decision-cycles in the network for protection, management and application support. They require the establishment of situation awareness in network nodes as the basis for making decisions. Fraunhofer FOKUS has developed a Node Collaboration System (NCS) that provides situation awareness based on the collaboration of network nodes. Due to its cross-layer design it also allows the collaboration of services with network nodes to include service feedback to network decision functions.

by Stuart M. Allen, Marco Conti, Andrea Passarella and Roger M. Whitaker

Wireless and mobile devices such as phones, MP3 players, sensors and PDAs are increasingly capable of creating and sharing content. Exploiting their owners’ social networks for communication between devices provides a unique way of translating qualitative human behaviour into adaptation for pervasive networking systems.

by Claude Castelluccia and Mohamed Ali Kaafar

The PLANETE research group at INRIA Grenoble in France is developing an 'owner-centric networking' architecture. This novel concept will considerably reduce 'data pollution' and improve privacy on the Internet.

by Bernd Gruber

Imagine that your computer could understand the kinds of data it handles and how to interlink them in an intelligent way: that is what the Semantic Web is all about. ebSemantics is establishing this innovative technology in the Austrian tourism industry to enable Web users to efficiently find relevant information on the Web.

by Vangelis Angelakis, Vasilios Siris and Apostolos Traganitis

Wireless mesh networks enable denser coverage and higher data rates than traditional wireless local area networks (LANs), while significantly lowering the deployment and operation costs compared to 3G mobile networks. These cost reductions combined with symmetric bandwidth for uplink/downlink communication will make wireless mesh networks a key architecture for future IP-based radio access networks, enabling innovative pervasive services based on ubiquitous broadband access.

by Almudena Díaz and Pedro Merino

Due to its computing power, portable information, good connectivity, proximity to users, multimedia hardware such as cameras, and localization hardware such as GPS, the smartphone is positioned as the primary connection device for the future Internet.