The way 4WARD to the creation of a future internet

In this paper, we describe the approaches taken in the 4WARD project to address the challenges of the network of the future. Our main hypothesis is that the Future Internet must allow for the fast creation of diverse network designs and paradigms, and must also support their co-existence at run-time. We observe that a pure evolutionary path from the current Internet design will not be able to address, in a satisfactory manner, major issues like the handling of mobile users, information access and delivery, wide area sensor network applications, high management complexity, and malicious traffic that hamper network performance already today. Moreover, the Internet’s focus on interconnecting hosts and delivering bits has to be replaced by a more holistic vision of a network of information and content. This is a natural evolution of scope requiring nonetheless a re-design of the architecture. We describe how 4WARD directs research on network virtualisation, novel InNetworkManagement, a generic path concept, and an information centric approach, into a single framework for a diversified, but interoperable, network of the future.