The future of the Internet

Different endpoints will access services deployed in the Internet core through heterogeneous access networks. Huge developments are taking place today on each of the three fronts:

1. Internet core

Services deployed in the core can be categorized as follows.

a. Computation and storage: Data is getting centralized, and following Moore’s Law, data centers are getting cheaper to deploy. Force 10 recently announced 10Gbps Ethernet switches to connect server racks directly to IP backbones. Orion released a 96-node supercomputer small enough to fit under a computer desk. With better server virtualization technology, it will not be long before users will be able to own slices on their personal blade servers to store huge amounts of data and offload heavy computation from thin endpoint devices to centralized resources.

b. Policy control: The IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) creates a control plane that unifies wired and wireless ISPs to provide users with seamless roaming access to different services through a federated authentication/billing framework. IMS also enables a basic infrastructure for pushing alerts to endpoints, acquisition of location and presence information, and other features, that allow application providers to deploy new applications and services easily. It is expected to hit full-fledged deployment by 2010.

2. Access networks

A whole plethora of wireless and wired technologies are being deployed, and this will lead to a highly heterogeneous access infrastructure because each technology complements the others, and is best suited for its own set of applications.

a. Fixed broadband: Huge investments are being made by Verizon for FTTH and by SBC for FTTP which promise to deliver IP based video content and broadband Internet access to homes. Even cable companies like Comcast are laying out extra fiber to enhance their network capacities. At the same time, there is growing interest in fixed wireless broadband services through WiMax 802.16d CPEs (Customer Premise Equipment) because a wireless infrastructure is cheaper to deploy. Furthermore, attachments of WiFi access points to each fixed network connection will not only allow high-speed wireless access inside homes and offices, but it will also provide better backhaul mechanisms for WiFi mesh networks described next.

b. Mobile broadband: We consider technologies like 3G EvDO and UMTS, WiFi meshes, WiMax 802.16e as competing with each other for mobile broadband Internet access. Although their respective network characteristics and costs differ widely, they will continue to coexist and overlap for a number of years, driven by different providers who support different technologies.

c. Mobile video: Infrastructure is just beginning to get deployed for delivery of video on wireless to mobile devices. DVB-H and Qualcomm’s MediaFLO are suited for video broadcast and require their own terrestrial broadcast infrastructure, while BCMCS and MBMS are better for multicast on CDMA and UMTS networks respectively. Newer technologies like DRM are able to achieve video transmission on AM as well, and are likely to come into the mainstream as well.

3. Devices

Endpoints are becoming more and more powerful. Not only are computation and storage on the devices getting faster and better, even battery life is increasing manifold with recent developments on fuel-cell research. Samsung now markets laptops with hybrid flash and hard-disk persistent storage that reduce the battery consumption even further. The fastest growth has however been on the cellphone front with more than 1.8 billion devices in the market today, and it is projected that cellphones (or docked cellphones ) will be the dominant form-factor for accessing the Internet in the future. Different devices can be categorized in terms of their mobility, and this determines the kind of access networks that they will use. For example, TiVo set-top DVR boxes converged with computer desktops will rely on the fixed broadband network infrastructure, whereas cellphones will generally use EvDO/UMTS and MediaFLO kind of technologies, and laptops will mostly use WiFi inside buildings and wireless broadband when on the move. Since each device can potentially connect to different networks in different circumstances, most mobile devices are now capable of interfacing with multiple technologies.

The other kind of devices is sensors. In the next couple of years sensors will become ubiquitous in homes, in cars, in farms, with the aggregate information backhauled over wireless networks. Eventually each electronic device will have sensors embedded in it, and this will have a tremendous impact on our civilization.

All these technologies will enable a lot of new applications. Imagine being able to download soccer highlights on your cellphone, watch television on your laptop, stream music from your desktop at home to your iPod, do a high bandwidth upload of pictures and videos from your cellphone to a data center, synchronize your office desktop to your tablet PC, download large email attachments on WiFi and just the email bodies on GPRS, monitor real time what is going on in your home, and many more things. It is very likely that a lot of you might have heard of such descriptions for future architecture in the Internet, but it is difficult to see through this maze of technological developments and recognize the missing pieces that are required to realize the final vision. This is what research should focus on these days.