Abstract

ITR/SII Collaborative Research:
Scalable Services for the Global Network

The emergence of new applications has fostered a number of attempts to add functionalities to the minimalist Internet core. However, the adoption of enhancements to the Internet has either been slow, failed entirely, or limited to special-purpose private networks. The key reasons for this failure are extensibility and scalability: First, IP networks were not designed to be extensible at the internetworking level. Second, proposals for new network layer services often require that vast amounts of state information be managed in the core network infrastructure, thus, introducing scalability bottlenecks which exacerbate the existing scalability problem of the growing Internet.

Today, the development and deployment of advanced services on the Internet has reached a crossroads: efforts to add new services have quickly encountered scalability problems, yet new services are in critical demand and must be rapidly and widely deployed. Our goal is to develop truly scalable services for each of the three fundamental components of the Internet’s infrastructure: information communication, replication, and storage. Taking a new and unified approach to the seemingly conflicting requirements for scalability and sophisticated network services, we propose to develop:

  1. Scalable Performance-Predictable Communication: a new foundation for quality-of-service communica-tion via a scalable edge-based architecture.
  2. Scalable Multicast for Efficient Data Dissemination: a self-organizing multicast infrastructure scalable to many spontaneously-formed groups.
  3. Scalable Storage for Next Generation Information Services: an infrastructure which brings information closer to users and enables scalable third-party information storage services.
  4. Design Principles of Scalable Services: a multi-faceted approach for the development and deployment of scalable services in the global Internet, under consideration of economic models, industrial structure, theories and algorithms, engineering, and deployment.
Thus, this project proposes to develop architectures and methodologies for deploying scalable services in the global Internet. The impact of this project will be to provide the theoretical underpinnings, basic architecture, and a prototype implementation for the information communication of the global Internet of the 21st century. An integral part of this project is the dissemination of results and the infiltration of standard organizations with the concepts developed within this project, and innovative approaches to educate the next generation of engineers for the future Internet.