A taxonomy of network challenges

Communication networks, in particular the Internet, face a wide spectrum of challenges that can disrupt our daily lives. We define challenges as adverse events triggering faults that eventually result in service failures. Understanding these challenges accordingly is essential for the improvement of the current networks and for designing Future Internet architectures. In this paper, we present a taxonomy of network challenges based on past and potential events. Moreover, we describe how the challenges correlate with our taxonomy. We believe that such a taxonomy is valuable for evaluating design choices as well as establishing a common terminology among researchers.