A Vision of the Next Generation Internet: A Policy Oriented Perspective

The host centric design of the current Internet does not recognize data and end-users as integral entities of the system. The first generation of Internet has been very successful and yet business, organizations, governments are finding it difficult to enforce their policies on their networks with the same ease that they do other methods of communications and transport. Ad-Hoc solutions e.g. firewalls, NAT, middle boxes etc, that tries to mitigate these issues end up providing localized myopic fixes which often hurt the basic underlying principles of the original design. The current Internet usage is “data centric” as evidenced by the popularity of the peer-to-peer applications. Data centric view abstracts a data requestor from having to know where the data comes from. We envision the future internet to be a dynamic, heterogeneous, secure, energy efficient omnipresent network flexible enough to support innovations and policy enforcements both at the edge and the core. The first step towards the next generation is the redesign of naming and name binding mechanisms. We, therefore, propose a Policy Oriented Network Architecture (PONA) and an abstract two part protocol stack with a virtualization layer in between. PONA provides a generic architecture which allows us to implement datacentric, host-centric, and user-centric Internet architecture. We also introduce the concept of generalized communication end-points – hosts, users, data/services, instantiate the ideas with the Mapping and Negotiation layer and provide an integrated framework for the next generation Internet. Both new Internets hope to develop new, faster technologies to enhance research and communication, and it is expected that both projects will eventually improve the current commercial Internet.