Almost four decades have gone by since UCLA professor Leonard Kleinrock first saw the exchange of futile test data between two machines on Sept. 2, 1969. Now, some university researchers, in harmony with the federal government, are sniffing the idea of scrapping the Internet and start all over again.
The idea may seem unthinkable, even absurd, but many believe a “clean slate” approach is the only way to truly address security, mobility and other challenges.
Dipankar Raychaudhuri, a Rutgers University professor stated that ‘the Internet works well in many situations but was designed for completely different assumptions. It’s sort of a miracle that it continues to work well today.‘ The researchers have the point now to reorganize the Internet’s underlying architecture to facilitate better channel future traffic over the existing pipes.
One of the challenges during rebuilding will be the issue of balancing the interests of various constituencies. The same sort of research has already been backed by European Union in a program dubbed Future Internet Research and Experimentation (FIRE).
McKeown, co-director of Stanford’s clean-slate program said:
Let’s try to define where we think we should end up, what we think the Internet should look like in 15 years’ time, and only then would we decide the path. We acknowledge it’s going to be really hard but I think it will be a mistake to be deterred by that.
Now, the possibilities are that the researchers might build a new network that runs in parallel with the existing internet or they might rebuild it from scratch level. It would require huge funding so we can’t expect the big change anytime soon.
To me, the idea seems wild but not that much wild as everything asks for a change at a certain point of time. Apparently, researchers might be thinking that the time has finally come for the overall change in the Internet’s underlying architecture. Bring us a new Internet; we are waiting.
Via: Time
