Paper: "State of the Internet & Challenges ahead "

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: Steve Goldstein [steve.goldstein () cox net]
Sent: Thursday, March 20, 2008 10:59 AM
To: Dewayne Hendricks; David Farber
Subject: Paper: "State of the Internet & Challenges ahead "

Olivier Martin, a long-time colleague, formerly from CERN (the European high energy accelerator lab in Geneva), has a 
fine "State of the Internet" preprint on his web site. Be sure to view it in Page Layout so that you can see the 
footnotes.  I did not at first, and missed them entirely, which was very confusing, as there are numbered references 
listed at the end as well.

http://www.ictconsulting.ch/reports/NEC2007-OHMartin.doc

Olivier has retired, but apparently keeps busy as a consultant.  He was a major player in CERN networking from the very 
start of things.  In the early days, CERN was the hub of European Internet Protocol networking, and it still is a major 
player because of the HUGE amounts of data that are generated by the accelerators and shared globally.


State of the Internet & Challenges ahead
"How is the Internet likely to evolve in the coming decade"

To be published in the NEC'2007 conference proceedings

Olivier H. Martin

ICTConsulting, Gingins (VD), Switzerland

Abstract

After a fairly extensive review of the state of the Commercial and Research & Education, aka Academic, Internet the 
problematic behind the, still hypothetic, IPv4 to IPv6 migration will be examined in detail.  A short review of the 
ongoing efforts to re-design the Internet in a clean-slate approach will then be made. This will include the National 
Science Foundation (NSF) funded programs such as FIND (Future Internet Network Design) [1] and GENI (Global Environment 
for Network Innovations) [2], European Union (EU) Framework Program 7 (FP7), but also more specific architectural 
proposals such as the publish/subscribe (pub/sub) paradigm and Data Oriented Network Architecture (DONA) [3].

Key words:  Internet, GÉANT2, Internet2, NLR, NSF, GENI, FIND, DONA, OECD, IETF, IAB, IGF, ICANN, RIPE , IPv6, EU, FP7, 
clean-slate, new paradigms.
1 Introduction
While there appears to be a wide consensus about the fact that the Internet has stalled or ossified, some would even 
say that it is in a rapid state of degeneracy, there is no agreement on a plan of action to rescue the Internet. There 
are two competing approaches, evolutionary or clean-slate. While a clean-slate approach has a lot of attractiveness it 
does not seem to be realistic given the time constraints arising from the fact that the IPv4 address space will be 
exhausted in a few years time, despite the fact that IANA  (the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) is about to allow 
an IPv4 "trading model" to be created . Therefore, the migration to IPv6 looks "almost" unavoidable, though by no means 
certain , as the widespread usage of Network Address Translators (NAT) and Application Level Gateways (ALG) is both 
unlikely to scale indefinitely and/or to meet the ever evolving Internet users' expectations and requirements. However, 
new ideas arising from more radical and innovative approaches could probably be retrofitted into the existing Internet, 
e.g. self-certifying names, à la "DONA ". The purpose of this paper is to raise awareness about the ongoing initiatives 
with a special emphasis on technical issues and possible remedies or solutions, it does not attempt in any way to be 
exhaustive as the subject of the Internet evolution including the societal, ethical and governance aspects are far too 
wide and complex to be addressed in a single article.
2 Main Sources
Most of the information appearing in this paper has been extracted from the following Web sites and conferences, Terena 
Networking Conference  2007 [4] and, in particular: "The latest development in NSF's GENI/FIND projects and their 
influence on the European Networking Community  [5]" by Jiri Navratil (CESNET), STARPLANE: "An Application-controlled 
Photonic network  [6]", by Cees de Laat (University of Amsterdam), "Is Global IPv6 Deployment on Track?  [7]", by 
Carlos Friaças (FCCN), RIPE55  [8], NANOG41  [9], CCIRN  2007 [10], IEPG  2007 [11], "IPv6 Transition and Operational 
Reality [12]", by Randy Bush (IIJ ), Australian IPv6 summit  2007 [13], OECD workshops  [14], IAB workshops  [15], 
"Living the Future [16]" by Dirk Trossen (NOKIA), IPv4 Address Report  [17], CircleID  [18], Geoff Houston's posts  
[19], Global IPv6 launch event  (2004) [20].


Regards,

--SteveG

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