subject: Internet is best for future [print this page] Internet is best for future Internet is best for future
The Internet is feeling the strain. Developed in the 1970s and 1980s for a community of a few thousand researchers, most of whom knew and trusted one another, the Internet has now become a crucial worldwide infrastructure that connects nearly two billion people, roughly a quarter of humanity. It offers up something like a trillion web pages, and transports roughly 10 billion gigabytes of data a month a figure that is expected to quadruple by 2012. Moreover, those two billion users are exploiting the network in ways that its creators only dimly imagined, with applications ranging from e-commerce to cloud computing, streaming audio and video, ubiquitous mobile devices and the transport of massive scientific data sets from facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider, the world's highest-energy particle accelerator, based near Geneva, Switzerland.
Make the pipes adaptable
The problem with the bigger-and-bigger-data-pipe approach to dealing with the Internet's growth is that it perpetuates a certain dumbness in the system, says electrical engineer Keren Bergman of Columbia University in New York. Right now, there is no way for a user to say: "This ultrahigh-resolution video conference I'm in is really important, so I need to send the data with the least delay and highest bandwidth possible", or "I'm just doing routine e-mail and web surfing at the moment, so feel free to prioritize other data". The network treats every bit of data the same. There is also no way for the Internet to minimize redundancy. If 1,000 people are logged into a massively multiplayer role-playing game such as World of Warcraft, the network has to provide 1,000 individual data streams, even though most are close to identical.
This is easier said than done, however, because the dumbness is deliberate. In an effort to simplify the engineering, Bergman explains, the architecture of the Internet is carefully segregated into 'layers' that take one another for granted. This means that application programmers, for example, don't have to worry about physical data connections when they are developing new software for streaming video or online data processing; they can just assume that the bits will flow. Likewise, engineers working on the physical connections can ignore what the applications are doing. And neither has to worry about in-between layers such as TCP/IP (Transfer Control Protocol/Internet Protocol): the fundamental Internet software that governs how digital messages are broken up into 'packets', routed to their destination, then reassembled.
"Global connectivity means you have no way to prevent large-scale attacks."
Control the congestion
Meanwhile, however, some researchers are taking issue with TCP itself. Any time a data packet fails to reach its destination, explains Steven Low, professor of computer science and electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, TCP assumes that the culprit is congestion at one of the router devices that switch packets from one data line to another. So it orders the source computer to slow down and let the backlog clear. And generally, says Low, TCP is right: whenever too many data try to crowd through such an intersection, the result is a digital traffic jam, followed by a sudden spike in the number of packets that get garbled, delayed or lost. Moreover, the tsunami of data now pouring through the Internet means that congestion can crop up anywhere, whether the routers are switching packets between high-capacity fibre-optic land lines carrying data across a continent, or funnelling them down a copper telephone wire to a user's house.
To test his FAST TCP algorithms, Low's lab teamed up with Caltech's high-energy physics community, which needed to transmit huge files to researchers in 30 countries on a daily basis. From 2003 to 2006, the team broke Internet world network speed records at the International Supercomputing Conference's annual Bandwidth Challenge, which is carried out on the ultrahigh-speed US research networks Internet2 and National LambdaRail. In the 2006 event, they demonstrated a sustained speed of 100 gigabits per second, and a peak transfer speed of 131 gigabits per second records that have not been substantially bettered by subsequent winners of the challenge.
Integrate social-networking concepts
What's great about the Internet, says computer scientist Felix Wu of the University of California, Davis, is that anyone with an address on the network can contact anyone else who has one. But that's also what's terrible about it. "Global connectivity means you have no way to prevent large-scale attacks," he says, citing as an example recent digital assaults that have temporarily shut down popular sites such as Twitter. "At the same time you are getting convenience, you are actually giving people the power to do damage."
Davis Social Links is part of the GENI test bed and will soon start testing with up to 10 million network nodes. But even if this approach turns out not to be viable, says Wu, more types of social research need to be integrated into the future Internet. "We need to mimic real human communication," he says.
