Researchers want to create next-generation internet

US university pioneers research into tweaking net to focus on content not IP address

NDN would be an improvement on current internet architecture

A team at the University of Illinois is working with researchers from UCLA and other institutions to develop a new internet architecture called Named Data Networking (NDN).

The internet was first envisaged as a way of maintaining the integrity of US military networks in the event of nuclear attack. The internet protocol (IP) was devised as the best way of allowing computers to find one another and communicate over a network.

The internet of today has evolved in ways that could hardly have been imagined in 1969 when the first computers were linked in what would become the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET).

Today's internet users want to find content, rather than specific machines and a team of researchers, led by computer science professor Tarek Abdelzaher at the University of Illinois, is working to transform the internet and create a new, more content-focused architecture to reflect these demands.

Abdelzaher and his team, in collaboration with UCLA, are working on developing applications for the internet of the future. They aim to prove how NDN can simplify development of these applications as well as make them more efficient and reliable.

“Since the amount of information that sensors and other modern technology generates and stores grows exponentially, whereas our ability to comprehend and consume it does not, future applications will be centered around some notion of information distillation – that is to say, bridging the growing gap between the increasing amounts of raw data on one end and the human need for succinct, actionable information on the other,” explains Abdelzaher.

“One can think of web browsing as one example of [a rather poorly automated and inefficient form of] information distillation, where humans look for useful information in a sea of possibly irrelevant data.”

The team believes that NDN has the potential to significantly improve internet performance and greatly simplify the development and distribution of applications provided by cloud computing.

"As our reliance on a secure and highly dependable information technology infrastructure continues to increase, it is no longer clear that emerging and future needs of our society can be met by the current trajectory of incremental changes to the current internet," said Ty Znati, director of the computer and network systems division within Computer and Information Science and Engineering.

"We are therefore calling out to the research community to propose new internet architectures that hold promise for the future."