Is it time to scrap the internet?

When my lecturer gave us this topic to research on I was amazed. Are there really plans to scrap the internet we have come to love and enjoy so much? I couldn't believe it! I didn't even know there was research going on about scraping the net. After researching though i found out the internet really does need fixing and by "scraping it", what they actually mean is "starting on a clean slate" with a safer, more reliable internet. Here's bits of what I found out if anyone is interested.

The internet is one of the most successful inventions in communications history and is used for almost everything, but there is research already going on to scrap it and start on a clean slate. Bloggers across the net are going on and on with worry about “the federal boffins” who want to scrap the internet.

Why start over with a new internet?

It has taken nearly four decades to get this far in building the Internet since UCLA Professor Leonard Kleinrock helped supervise the first exchange of meaningless test data between two machines on Sept. 2, 1969. Today users enjoy unlimited access to multimedia services and many corporate enterprises (Google, yahoo, eBay etc) profit from the status quo. The idea of scraping the internet seems unimaginable, absurd even. But the internet has fallen victim of its own success. Its end-to-end principle (smart at the edges and dumb in the middle) has led to its lack of flexibility or intelligence to allow new ideas to be tested and deployed. Typical examples would be how long it took to deploy IPv6, multicast and the very limited deployment of differential qualities of service.

The internet is also a best-effort network which means it is often “broken” and frequently disconnected due to failures in equipment or fragile routing protocols. It’s unreliable and its behavior is unpredictable making it unsuitable for time-critical applications. When the internet was first created it was thought that it could be routinely used for essential services like air-traffic control and remote surgery. This has not happened because the internet turned out to be unreliable and security compromised. "If air-traffic control was carried on the Internet, I, for one, wouldn't fly” says Nick McKeown, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford and leader of the Clean Slate project currently being run at Stanford University in the USA. I share his sentiments.

Some of the short comings of the internet are self-evident, such as the plaque of security breaches, spread of worms, and denial of service attacks. It is rampant with malicious users. The intent of data on the internet can be disguised to look as though it was sent for legitimate reasons when actually it is intended to damage the network, spreading viruses or for other malicious activities. There’s no way of knowing exactly whom data comes from because the network’s design makes it very easy to fake any information’s origin. It does not provide some verification mechanism for any data being sent. It is also very easy for hackers to obtain confidential information through the internet as it does not facilitate anonymity where prudent.

The internet was primarily designed for computers in fixed location and is thus ill-suited to support mobile end-users. Identity and location is represented in one entity, the actual computer (IP Address) and there is no representation for the real end system: the human users. This makes supporting mobility difficult. As result wireless broadband users accessing the internet on their laptops are limited to a certain radius, beyond which, they are cut off. There is no smooth handover as with cell phones.

The real end system on the internet is the user, not the physical computer. A user has a name, an identity number and a physical address. The address changes when a user moves to another town, but the name and identity number remain the same. The IP address, used for connectivity is the equivalent of the physical address. Connecting to an IP address, which changes, means that mobility of the end system (the user) is not supported. The connection should be to the identity number which does not change and thus supports mobility.

The greatest concern of the internet is that it does not ensure quality of service, QoS. The reliability of packet delivery is hard to improve with the internet’s current architecture. It is prone to access link failures, routing failures (security, configuration, convergence, and multipath), congestion control failures and many other technical problems. From the user’s perspective dominant failures include out of date email addresses, broken links, misleading urls and/or unauthenticated data, unusable or unreliable email due to spam, etc.

With all these problems currently overwhelming the internet, researchers say the time has come to rethink the Internet's underlying architecture, a move that could mean replacing networking equipment and rewriting software on computers to better channel future traffic over the existing pipes.

One challenge in rebuilding the internet, however, dealing with resistance to change due to the current internet’s commercial success. The new internet will have to be as beneficial to all users as it is today. Industry must play a bigger role in defining the new internet, and, with law enforcement bound to make its needs for wiretapping known, the users’ right to privacy must not be compromised.

Research Projects currently underway

The National Science Foundation (NSF) wants to build an experimental research network known as the Global Environment for Network Innovations, or GENI, and is funding several projects at universities and elsewhere through Future Internet Network Design, or FIND.

Rutgers, Stanford, Princeton, Carnegie Mellon and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are among the universities pursuing individual projects. Other government agencies, including the Defence Department, have also been exploring the concept.

The European Union has also backed research on such initiatives, through a program known as Future Internet Research and Experimentation, or FIRE.

A new network could run parallel with the current Internet and eventually replace it, or perhaps aspects of the research could go into a major overhaul of the existing architecture. These clean-slate efforts are still in their early stages, though, and aren't expected to be deployed for another 10 or 15 years. As reported in the Chicago Tribune, April 16, 2007, Guru Parulkar, who will become executive director of Stanford's initiative after heading NSF's clean-slate programs, estimated that GENI alone could cost $350 million, while government, university and industry spending on the individual projects could collectively reach $300 million. Spending so far has been in the tens of millions of dollars. Replacing all the software and hardware deep in the legacy systems could take billions of dollars too.


References

Whitepaper, Clean Slate Design for the Internet. [online] http://cleanslate.stanford.edu/CleanSlateWhitepaperV2.pdf. [Lasted accessed 01 July 2007]

Raj Jain, Internet 3.0, [online] http://www.cse.wustl.edu/~jain/talks/internet3.htm. [Lasted accessed 01 July 2007]

Scott Shenker, ‘Rethinking the Internet Architecture’, [online] http://cleanslate.stanford.edu/past_seminars.php, [Lasted accessed 01 July 2007]
http://www.geni.net/research.html. [Lasted accessed 01 July 2007]

NSF budget report, http://www.nanoscience.gatech.edu/zlwang/news/news/NSF.pdf, 5 Feb 2007