"The Future Networked Society" - A Great Opportunity for Europe

There are many questions today on how the Internet will develop in the future.

What has been clearly identified throughout the industry and research community is that the Internet must change, and that the degree of change must be revolutionary. Once we determine what sort of changes are needed, we can start working on how to migrate from today's Internet to the forecasted 2015 Internet, and beyond.

Today’s Internet was never designed to be a critical part of an economy’s infrastructure

—but it has become exactly that.  In fact, it has become a critical infrastructure for the overall society in developed countries. Now we can clearly see that the future Internet should be able to sustain an order of magnitude increase of the number of people connected to it, and the addition of billions—perhaps even tens of billions—of devices such as sensors, tags, micro-controllers, etc. With that in mind, the future Internet must not be seen as a mere technical entity, but as an integral enabler of the Future Networked Society. This leads to the logical argument that new research paradigms need to be explored and more interdisciplinary research is required in this domain.

One of the key findings of the EIFFEL group is the need for a balanced research agenda towards the Future Networked Society.

There is a clear need to support evolutionary, applied engineering research, based on present industry needs towards the future. But this is not enough to ensure that great opportunities are grasped by Europe. The evolutionary path has to be supplemented by a portfolio of radical explorative research activities that will push beyond the limits of existing systems and open the doors for new opportunities towards the future. For this, it is important to launch a new culture of risk taking along this path of explorative and possibly disruptive research.

This EIFFEL report recommends to the EC that a phased approach in the research must be adopted.

There is ever increasing consensus that we need to find more radical solutions. As these radical design principles need to be debated, in fact those need to be discovered, Europe should start with smaller and explorative projects, before launching larger and integrative projects that test out different avenues. At all costs we must avoid proposing more short-term solutions or “patches”. This has been the evolutionary practice to date which is leading us towards increasing complexity and architectural deterioration without the performance gain we need.

The EIFFEL report also calls for the best possible people to be mobilized and motivated towards this goal.

The challenge is to make this happen. Although a lot of good work has been done in Europe, the research is still fragmented. There is a present and clear danger that Framework Programme 7 research in this domain could become even more fragmented unless something radical is done to stop this. This report recommends specifically that some closer technical and social orchestration between research stakeholders is required.

The EIFFEL think tank specifically proposes two actions to be taken:

Firstly,
a more permanent, level-field support agent is proposed to facilitate technical level orchestration between different stakeholders, including ETPs, in an IPR neutral way. Furthermore, continuous monitoring of outputs along the explorative path and fine tuning of overall roadmaps is recommended as a key activity of this orchestration effort. It is envisioned that for this purpose such support action would also be an academically led operation, but with strong links to industry. The current EIFFEL initiative could serve as a basis for this support action to kick off immediately.

Secondly,
it is proposed to create coordinated efforts around the study of alternative architectures with the ultimate goal of “raising new architects” through a focused research activity of its own. The EIFFEL group is emphasizing that such architectural considerations are required but several parallel smaller efforts on different architectural principles in the first phase might be the most productive than attempting the to define the complete new architecture in one project.