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It’s Time to Upgrade the Entire Internet

Posted on March 28, 2007 by Tuesday Creative
Tech

In 1958 the United States created the Advanced Research Projects Agency to compete with Soviet technology (The USSR launched Sputnik four months earlier). Eleven years later the worlds first packet switched network, ARPANET,was born. Research continued, innovation flourished and on January 1, 1983 the National Science Foundation unveiled the worlds first wide-area network and the TCP/IP protocol. The modern internet was born.

The internet is used today in ways original architects did not imagine twenty years ago. Likewise, the world has changed a great deal since then. Phone lines were replaced by broadband which will be eventually replaced by fiber. Data measured in bytes seems quaint compared to the terabytes (even petabytes) of data regularly exchanged today. Even the original intent of the internet—the exchange of scientific research—has been far eclipsed by its use in commercial and social activities. The fundamental underlying architecture of the TCP/IP network is rapidly reaching its limits. It’s time to reinvent the internet.

The common set of rules for how computers talk to each other over a network is showing signs of age. The architecture originally intended for any computer in the network to be reachable by its network address, is the unique four-part number. The names we type into our browsers today are all connected to some network address (for example, www.google.com is 66.102.7.99). Because of the way network addresses are structured, a decision made over 20 years ago, there can only be 4,294,967,296 unique addresses so Network Address Translators were invented to extend them. Additionally, the meteoric rise of malware and unscrupulous use of the internet gave rise to firewalls. These evolutionary necessities make addressing each individual computer, a fundamental principle of the original design, impossible.

As more and more generations of technology are stacked on top of the existing TCP/IP architecture the system becomes more rigid, inflexible and incompatible. NAT devices are incompatible with many types of security encryption. Almost all forms of internet security are incompatible with transparent web caches. Traceroute and other web diagnostic tools are incompatible with transparent web caches. NAT devices are not compliant with dumb networks. Firewalls make the development of new protocols very complicated. The more layers of code added to the architecture, the harder and harder it becomes to develop new and innovative products. While the internet serves the majority of the world very well today, it is likely that the increasing inflexibility of the system will soon lead to slowed growth, depressed innovation. It’s time to take what we’ve learned over the last 20 years and start building ourselves a network that will support today’s and tomorrow’s needs, evolve gracefully over the long term, and sustain itself for the next generation.

David Clark, the internet’s chief protocol architect and one of the fathers of the internet, is actively leading the National Science Foundation’s research into the development of the next architecture. The new internet is currently in research phase and it will be years before we see the next generation of the internet in common use. We already have an infrastructure to build and test it on: LambdaRail—the nationwide optical network that researchers are using to experiment with new networking technologies and applications. We just need to decide its important enough to devote the resources to it.

Clark writes about the original intent and the future needs of the global network:

The original intent of the internet architecture:

To connect existing networks
To continue to work even if some networks were lost
To accommodate a wire variety of protocols (like http, ftp, etc.)
To distribute resources around the globe instead of in a small number of centralized locations
To be a cost-effective means of communication
To be relatively simple for end-users to connect

New requirements for a next-generation network that are not part of the current design:

To be mobile, dynamic and flexible
To be auto-configurable on the end-user side and support per-network policy constraints
To support dynamic switching of connection method, important for creating consistent connections for mobile devices
To support dynamic reallocation of system resources, for example better connections for emergency services during a disaster at the expense of common users
Built-in security encryption support to create a standard and embrace expanded internet commerce
To provide users with more choices and control over what route their data takes to get from one place to another, much like choosing a local and long-distance telephone service.
To make data packets trackable to combat malicious internet use like spam, phishing, hacking and bot farming

If the new architecture sufficiently meets the needs of the primary organizations that would fund its development (service providers, governments, universities, large corporations) we may see these changes sooner than we realize. Likewise, if the new architecture promises a spam and virus-free internet, more secure e-commerce and ubiquitous connectivity, the market will undoubtedly demand it. Isn’t it’s time for an upgrade?