Addressing Architecture and Design for the Future Internet

The need for structural changes in the Internet is becoming increasingly evident. The SAIL project is taking an evolutionary approach and builds on results of previous projects such as 4WARD to develop the next generation Internet architecture that can better cope with the new challanges such as mobility, heterogenity, and increased information dissemination.

SAIL is a project in the European 7th Framework Program and partly funded by EU. It belongs to the Objective "Network of the Future" and started in August 2010, with a first phase of 2 1/2 years.

SAIL addresses the Future Internet challenge

Today's network architectures are stifling innovation, restricting it mostly to the application level, while the need for structural change is increasingly evident. The absence of adequate facilities to design, optimize, and interoperate new networks currently forces a convergence to an architecture that is suboptimal for many applications, and that cannot support innovations within itself, the Internet. We have reached a critical point in the impressive development cycle of the Internet that now requires a major change.

SAIL will both design technologies for the Networks of the Future and develop techniques to transition from today’s networks to such future concepts. SAIL leverages state-of-the-art architectures and technologies, extends them as needed, and integrates them. SAIL uses experimentally-driven research, building prototypes that will proof the advantages in concrete use cases.

The SAIL project focuses on three main technical objectives that address the core of the observed trends.  In short, it will provide a comprehensive, working solution for responding to these changes, by integrating a Network of Information and Cloud Networking with Open Connectivity Services.

Work packages

The University of Paderborn ‒ Research Group Computer Networks ‒ is mainly involved in the following two work packages: Network of Information (NetInf) and Cloud Networking (CloNe

Network of Information

The current Internet is based on the notion of communication between nodes. To get a web page, you first figure out what the name of the node storing the page is, and then retrieve the page from that node. During the transfer, the information is more or less anonymous to intermediate nodes through which the information passes. A consequence of this design is that it becomes unnecessarily hard to design efficient information distribution schemes, or to handle disruptions in connectivity. Most people are however not interested in the nodes – they are interested in the information objects. It does not matter from which node it is retrieved, as long as it is the desired object.
We therefore take a different approach in this work package. Instead of the node-centric paradigm, we adopt an information-centric paradigm. In this paradigm, the communication abstraction presented to applications is based on transfer of application data objects instead of the end-to-end reliable byte-stream used by the majority of applications today. The main work of this work package consists of the design and experimental evaluation of the NetInf architecture.

Cloud Networking

It will design a novel cloud networking architecture supporting flash network slices, plus a management and a security framework that will be evaluated through the development of a large scale prototype distributed across different sites in Europe.  The utmost measurable performance indicator is the successful implementation of key novel technical solutions (e.g., flash network slices) and methods in the prototype.