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Is Europe Leading the Way to the Future Internet?
Lutz Heuser SAP Research Dan Woods CITO Research
Over the past 30 years, the Internet has proven to be a revolutionary technology, so much so that it has run far beyond
its original scope. The original Internet was designed as a network to connect academic researchers. From these humble beginnings, it grew into a global communications network as integral to our lives as roads, telephones, and public utilities. Increasingly, its taking on roles formerly performed by other infrastructures, such as mail (email), phones (voice over IP), television, and movies (streaming video). Simply put, its the global network of the 21st century.
Multiple rising demands are pushing the limits of Internet architecture and capacity mobile devices are proliferating, applications are scaling at astronomical speeds, and computing has become ubiquitous. Simultaneously, were witnessing an explosion of data from Web 2.0, machine-to-machine and peer-to-peer communications, and devices diversifying into forms such as RFID, sensors, and more.
But with all of this progress come numerous hurdles to leap as well. An immediate challenge is IP and addressing. The current Internet largely rests on IPv4, which allows for 4.3 billion unique addresses. Once upon a time, this number seemed adequate, but with only 1 billion addresses left and more people and devices coming online every minute, it could represent a major crisis in a relatively short amount of time. Its successor, IPv6, has enough address space for every atom on Earths surface plus 100 more Earths but so far, theres no consensus on a plan or timeline for migrating to this new protocol. Trafc continues to grow and place ever-greater demands on the network. According to estimates by Minnesota Internet Trafc Studies (MINTs), Internet trafc increases by roughly half each year, which amounts to a 100-fold increase every decade (www.dtc.umn.edu/mints/ home.php). As one group of experts observed in
the report Future Internet 2020, The truth is, the Internet was never designed for how it is now being used and is creaking at the seams (www.future-internet.eu/leadmin/documents/ reports/FI_Panel_Report_v3.1_Final.pdf).
For years, experts have argued that the current Internet would break at any moment, yet it has been much more robust than could be imagined (www.computer.org/portal/web/ internet/extras/Bob-Metcalf). Will this still hold for the...