Future Internet Architecture Project Research Articles

Time constructs: Design ideology and a future internet

This article engages the politics of technology as it examines how a discourse of time is framed by engineers and project principals in the course of the development of three future internet architecture projects: named data networking, eXpressive Internet Architecture, and Mobility First. This framing reveals categories of a discourse of time that include articulations of efficiency, speed, time as a technical resource, and notions of the future manifest in each project. The discursive categories fit into a time constructs model that exposes how these projects were built with regard to concepts of speed and how different notions of time are expressed as a design ideology intertwined with other ideologies. This time constructs framework represents a tool that can be used to expose the social and political values of technological development that are often hidden or are difficult to communicate in cross-disciplinary contexts.

Exploring the Intersection of Technology and Policy in the Future Internet Architecture Effort

Policy-making and regulation have played a significant role in the current Internet architecture. In this paper we open that same sort of dialog with the architects of the set of Future Internet Architecture projects funded by the NSF and the EC. The paper examines both the architectures themselves and key policy topics, including (1) net neutrality, (2) naming, addressing, and network management, (3) the rise of platforms, and (4) security. In each case, in one or another of the novel architectures, the path forward with respect to the topic does not directly parallel what has occurred in the current architecture.

The Internet of Futures Past: Values Trajectories of Networking Protocol Projects

The Internet was conceptualized as a technology that would be capable of bringing about a better future, but recent literature in science and technology studies and adjacent fields provides numerous examples of how this pervasive sociotechnical system has been shaped and used to dystopic ends. This article examines different future imaginaries present in Future Internet Architecture (FIA) projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 2006 to 2016, whose goal was to incorporate social values while building new protocols to replace Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol to transfer and route information across the ever-expanding Internet. I examine the findings from two of the NSF’s FIA projects—Mobility First (MF) and eXpressive Internet Architecture—to understand the projects’ trajectories and values directives through their funding cycle and their projections into the future. I discuss how project documentation and participant articulations fall into the following three distinct themes about past experience and speculation: understanding the public, negotiating resources, and carrying project values into the future. I conclude that if the future Internet is to promote positive sociotechnical relationships, its architects must recognize that complex social and political decisions pervade each step of technical work and do more to honor this fact.

Peer-to-peer file sharing in next generation eXpressive Internet Architecture

As a popular peer-to-peer protocol, BitTorrent is one of the most important methods for file sharing and distributing in today’s Internet. However, the BitTorrent protocol is built entirely at the application level. Without the support of network layer, peers in BitTorrent protocol have to exchange data content through TCP connections and BitTorrent applications has to handle every procedure in the whole file sharing process. As peer-to-peer has become an essential way for people to share and distribute files across the Internet, we believe it should be natively supported mechanism in the future Internet Architecture. The eXpressive Internet Architecture (XIA) is one of three Future Internet Architecture projects funded by US NSF. As a clean-slate network architecture, XIA has some novel features such as evolvability, flexible routing, and in-network cache for content delivery. In this paper, we propose a practical design of BitTorrent protocol implementation on XIA to explore and rethink the peer-to-peer file sharing mechanism in the future Internet architecture.

A Survey on Future Internet Security Architectures

Current host-centric Internet Protocol (IP) networks are facing unprecedented challenges, such as network attacks and the exhaustion of IP addresses. Motivated by emerging demands for security, mobility, and distributed networking, many research projects have been initiated to design the future Internet from a clean slate. In order to obtain a thorough knowledge of security in future Internet architecture, we review a number of well-known projects, including named data networking, Content Aware Searching Retrieval and sTreaming, MobilityFirst Future Internet Architecture Project (MobilityFirst), eXpressive Internet Architecture, and scalability, control, and isolation on next-generation network. These projects aim to move away from the traditional host-centric networks and replace them with content-centric, mobility-centric, or service-centric networks. However, different principles and designs also raise various issues on network security. For each project, we describe its architecture design and how it deals with security issues. Furthermore, we compare these projects and discuss their pros and cons. Open security issues are pointed out for directing future research.