If the internet could wish for anything on its 40th birthday, it would probably ask for a makeover to cope with today’s demands, from online banking to monitoring tsunamis. The internet of tomorrow needs to be more powerful, connected and intuitive – responding to our needs at home, work or on the go.

Research projects funded by the European Commission are spearheading future networks which are fast, flexible and ever-responsive to demands from both humans and machines for access to content, apps and services relevant to the context and location of the user.

This is how the Future Internet is evolving; as an internet of services, things and infrastructure; from smart appliances that talk to each other to clothes that monitor our health, from cars that can’t crash to mobile technologies and cloud platforms that run our businesses.

Thomas Edwall of Ericsson (SE) believes today’s internet is not broken exactly – we still manage to get what we want most of the time. “It just wasn’t made for billions of people and machines demanding connectivity while constantly on the move,” he says.

New networking approaches can fix it and “make it more relevant” to our needs, says Mr Edwall, but it is not as simple as replacing a microchip or installing fibre-optics or boosting wireless coverage everywhere to cope with the “mobile age.” No, it takes more fundamental work on the way all the components talk to each other and how applications and content is served up to consumers and end-users, and how the lifeblood of the internet – networks – are optimised to cope with future evolutions.

The EU-backed ‘Scalable and adaptive internet solutions’ (SAIL) project, coordinated by Mr Edwall, leverages state-of-the-art architectures and technologies in developing prototypes which can be test-driven in a vast range of real-world scenarios and use-cases built round three major dimensions in future networks: video, mobility and flash crowds.

Hard and soft

SAIL is an industry-led consortium of 25 operators, vendors, research institutions and SMEs. Combining hard and soft-science approaches to research and technological development, including outreach and dissemination activities, SAIL is a knowledge-rich incubator developing and helping to implement technologies for the Future Internet, Mr Edwall explains.

SAIL is not only developing technologies for the networks of the future, but also the techniques to streamline the transition from today’s networks to future concepts that evolve.

With the help of EU funding and support, the project has even enlisted the help of specialists, Johan Myrberger of Ericsson and Luis Correia of the Technical University of Lisbon, to address the so-called “soft aspects” of SAIL’s technologies, including the socio-economics, migration and standardisation groundwork, as well as outreach activities like the SAIL Summer School.

“For research projects like ours, sometimes the hardest part is not the technology or solutions that we come up with but ensuring that they make sense from a human and business perspective as well, and that migration to the new technology is smooth,” explains the dissemination expert Mr Correia.

The SAIL Summer School, held 25-28 June in Santander (ES), is an example of the human side of R&D. According to Mr Myrberger, the school was a hit because it really helped to explain the Future Internet’s state of play. One of the highlights was information about the new release of SAIL’s NetInf ‘network of information’ software (available on sourceforge.net). Students learned about the importance of ‘information-centric’ networks.

“With NetInf, named ‘information objects’ like the latest episode of your favourite TV-show are the central concept instead of a physical computer, or network ‘node’, as in today’s internet,” explains Mr Myrberger.

Clever cloud

SAIL’s high-profile work on cloud computing addresses some of the obstacles to cloud adoption recently debated at the EU’s Digital Agenda Assembly cloud workshop – and outlined in the previewed Advances in the Cloud Expert Report. The obstacles included guarantees on data and app portability between providers, better and more reliable connectivity, Europe-wide security certification to increase trust, and harmonised standards and interoperability of clouds and cloud services.

“To bring interoperability in the cloud, we need to consider both the North-bound interface (how customers request resources) but also the East-West interface (how data-centre and network providers actually realise the connectivity),” suggests Mr Edwall.

For the North-bound interface, SAIL is proposing the Open Cloud Networking Interface (OCNI) which extends the Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) API, to include connectivity requirements. For the East-West interface, SAIL proposes a new protocol, Distributed Control Plane (DCP) which allows network and data-centre providers to negotiate the actual parameters to establish end-to-end (E2E) connectivity.

SAIL is adding the network aspect to the cloud to connect and distribute cloud resources in the network. What’s more, its ‘open’ and ‘flexible’ approach should help with the ‘portability’ and ‘reliable connectivity’ barriers.

New tack

SAIL’s NetInf, cloud networking solutions and approach to open connectivity round up the project’s overall vision of designing technology that understands intuitively (from the ground up) that information and apps should be mobile – able to follow you anywhere – and found in different places on the network.

“Users need to be able to ‘address’ content directly, not through disparate servers dishing up a close copy of it,” says Mr Edwall. “Application providers need to be able to move their apps and content around the network quickly and automatically to meet varying demand.

“And of course the network needs to adapt rapidly to connect apps and end-users, and take advantage of all available resources,” he concludes.

This is where SAIL’s technologies and solutions offer a fresh tack on networking paradigms of today, helping the internet of tomorrow more efficiently carry out the myriad new tasks we demand of it.

http://cordis.europa.eu/fp7/ict/future-networks/net-tech-future/