It’s not everyday you look at the news and see that a group of the largest universities and Internet companies have decided it’s time to completely change the architecture of the Internet. But that’s what happened last week, as the formation of the Named Data Networking Consortium was announced. TCP/IP — short for Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol — was developed about 45 years ago to handle network communication between two computing devices identified by their IP addresses, and since then it has defined the way the Internet works. But a lot of Internet traffic these days looks more like broadcasting of content than one-to-one communication, and a growing number of network innovators feel that TCP/IP is about to reach its limits.
- Forget IP, Cisco thinks the answer to the data tsunami may be Named Data Networking (TelecomTV | Guy Daniels) “TCP/IP was created for a point-to-point, voice-centric world – a communications network. The fact that it has lasted so long and still supports the data-centric distribution networks of today is testimony to its creators’ skills. But with the IoT [Internet of Things] threatening to increase data traffic and apps by several orders of magnitude, ecommerce and digital media growing, the Internet has become a ‘distribution network’. Therefore, a rethink is required.”
- NDN project overview “To carry the Internet into the future, a conceptually simple yet transformational architectural shift is required, from today’s focus on where – addresses and hosts — to what – the content that users and applications care about. The Named Data Networking (NDN) project aims to develop a new Internet architecture that can capitalize on strengths — and address weaknesses — of the Internet’s current host-based, point-to-point communication architecture in order to naturally accommodate emerging patterns of communication.”
- UCLA, Cisco & more join forces to replace TCP/IP (Network World | Bob Brown) “Since that time [2010], participating organizations have somewhat quietly been working on new protocols and specifications, including a new packet format, that have been put through their paces in a testbed that spans from the United States to Asia. Their aim is to put forth an Internet architecture that’s more secure, able to support more bandwidth and friendlier to app developers. Cryptographic authentication, flow balance and adaptive routing/forwarding are among the key underlying principles.”
- DEATH TO TCP/IP cry Cisco, Intel, US gov and boffins galore (The Register | Simon Sharwood) “Intel, Huawei, Alcatel-Lucent, Qualcomm, Comcast and Orange are also contributing to the effort to create the new protocols. Work on the Named Data Networking (NDN) has been going on for some time: the National Science Foundation has been pumping in cash since 2010. The significance of this launch is that industry is now involved, and the consortium is committed to producing open-source software to take researchers’ work beyond the hypothetical.”
Articles from Ohio Web Library:
- UA-linked effort aims to retool workings of Net. (Arizona Daily Star, 12/06/2010 | Victoria Blute)
- Your gadgets are slowly breaking the Internet. (Technology Review, March/April 2013, p16-18 | David Talbot)
- Making the Internet safe for gadgets. (Communications of the ACM, Oct. 2013, p18-20 | Tom Geller)
