The internet: standing in motion

We are now in the information age. The internet, the backbone of our society has the potential to shape the way in which we perceive the universe.

With this in view, the following where I think where tomorrow's internet is going as a student of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

The internet today has nowhere to hide. The internet of things will be required support true information exchange. This information exchange warrants a forum for all concerned parties to "talk to each other"; we call this forum the internet. The strict layering imposed by the traditional model of the internet stood the test of homogenous scaling as it proliferated across the globe. But this model essentially assumed that all end systems were following the same standards, the same protocol. Today with the advent of sensor networks, vehicular networks etc. we suddenly have participants in the information exchange that "speak different languages". Therefore the new generation internet will have to be scalable such that it accommodates heterogeneous platforms.

A possible way to gain more flexibility in terms of end systems connected to the internet, might be to make the boundaries of the layers to fade. But this will lead to monolithic solutions that prohibit the internet's ability to adapt further. The purpose of protocol layering is to establish how we separate our "concerns", each layer corresponding to a different level of abstraction that indicates the part of the network in concern. What is needed is defining or at least interpreting the concerns afresh.

These "concerns" are based on the requirements from the information shared on the internet. For example, the purpose or the intent of an email containing a video clip of a football game is completely different from the intent of a communication with a cluster of environmental sensors at the Great Barrier Reef or atop the Himalayas. These messages differ not only in their information size but also in their urgency, their impact on the receiver and the required network resources. A rough parallel to the heterogeneity in the internet can be the internal architecture of a computing device. Different "nodes" like the CPU, MMU, ALU, Memory, I / O Devices, etc. share information across a common "network" namely the computer's internal bus. Since all the nodes here are within the computer's chip, the Operating System's scheduling algorithms and other such techniques manage allocation of "network resources" (the bus) among these nodes. Similarly the communication protocol developed for the internet also needs to manage how the network resources "shared" by the various nodes in the network. More interestingly, since the network here is inherently distributed the allocation cannot be centralized.

Protocol development also should encompass the hardware and software architecture of the nodes involved in the communication. As an example, sensor nodes have a resource constrained, event driven architecture. Hence information exchange with these cannot be done using standard SMTP / HTTP communication. Also given the low throughput, range issues and possible faults and failures in sensor networks we need to revisit our current monitoring scheme ICMP. When we talk of wireless networks, there are no hard and fast "connections" as in a wired internet. No network graph is known and communication is inherently unreliable. Control signals are needed for setting up the network, and for "house keeping" operations subsequently. All of these added requirements need to be handled by the internet.

A long story cut short, each layer of the protocol stacks along with standard protocols in these layers need to be revisited in terms of the changed requirement and the changed architectural constraints when we talk about the internet of things.