Internet Future Architectures for Network and Media Independent Services and Protocols

Current Internet has become an essential communication infrastructure, not only for information transfer but also as a key component of social infrastructures, such as e-government, energy/traffic controls, finance, learning, health, etc. Even though the Internet has evolved towards high-bandwidth network architectures offering transparent transport services for fixed and mobile applications, its future depends on how it is going to cope with several concerns on different aspects such as scalability, ubiquity, security, robustness, mobility, heterogeneity, Quality of Service (QoS), re-configurability, context-awareness, manageability, data-centric, economics, etc. This paper exposes the approaches proposed in the Spanish Government funded research project tin2010-20136- c03 to overcome identified drawbacks of the current internet, such as energy efficiency, network ossification, heterogeneity of information and coexistence of optical and wireless networks. In order to do so, two technologies have been identified as potential solutions to face some of these problems: i) Media Independence and ii) Virtualization. On the one hand, Media Independence enables the decoupling of the control plane from the physical technology specificities, by introducing an abstract control API to configure, monitor and command the physical interface. On the other hand, network virtualization strategies allow the partition of electrical and optical network infrastructures into multiple parallel, dedicated virtual networks for a physical infrastructure sharing purpose, and enables the creation of overlay networks spanning multiple technologies and realms, hence being a very useful tool for context-aware service composition.