Reinventing the Internet: How do we build a better network?

[Commentary] There are plenty of people concerned that wireline and wireless network routing, as it is now, might not work for much longer.

Between battles of peering, concerns over network neutrality, the changing shape of content and even concerns about network resiliency and privacy more people are looking at the current Internet and dreaming of a change that takes into account the growing dependence society has on the Internet. While, the projects below are not a complete list, they illustrate some of the big trends in how people with a stake in the Internet are thinking about making it better for the long haul and future network demands.

• Push everything to the edge: there is a dilemma for network architects: can pushing files out to the edge continue to solve problems as demand increases for fat content like video, but also when we’re building connected homes and cities that benefit from a more mesh-network structure where devices talk to each other as well as the public Internet?
• Peer to peer: the Internet isn’t just for serving content. It has always been a two-way communications mechanism, but in the last few years consumers have, well, consumed, more traffic than they have created online. That’s changing as more people put up videos, network their homes and communities start to use networks for sharing video content, sending medical files or other high-bandwidth applications. In some cases, while the data can be small, it tends to be sensitive to latency and distance, so sending it back to a central server doesn’t make sense.
• Named-data networks: here are a class of projects around the world and research networks that envision taking this concept to the network itself. Instead of talking to servers to get an address for a URL or device, nodes on the network are given a name and content is stored everywhere. The way content is given a name and the levels of encryption involved help define the different types of these networks.