Beyond the future Internet - Requirements of autonomic networking architectures to address long term future networking challenges

We present in this paper an overview of current problems with the Internet from the architectural view point, and we identify and forecast trends for future developments. Our study includes perspectives from different stakeholders of the Internet as well as from the technological development point of view. We conclude that current and future requirements vary greatly between, and even within, different stakeholders, which implies that a successful future network architecture mustprovide maximum flexibility with a minimal set of "hard-wired" properties. In specific, a revised version of the TCP/IP layered architecture would only suffice to address some of the current issues, but would not provide a long term solution. We then show that an autonomic network- architecture with afew simple architectural building blocks is enough to address a great deal of the requirements today and in thefuture.