Judging by the National Science Foundation's latest grants for Internet development, our universities are packed with scientists who think that the 'Net is woefully unprepared for the future, and are anxious to tackle the problem. In fact, these people can't wait to untether cyberspace from its current rules and architectures.

Take, for example, Professor Lixia Zhang of the University of California at Los Angeles. She started out driving a tractor on a farm in Northern China, then got to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1980s. Now she studies the Internet Protocol at UCLA, where she questions whether IP will carry the Internet to where it needs to go in the coming years.

"Users and applications operate in terms of content, making it increasingly limiting and difficult to conform to IP's requirement to communicate by discovering and specifying location," Dr. Zhang's NSF award statement explains. It's time to get past IP's host/location based assumptions with a new Internet architecture that she calls Named Data Networking (NDN).

Let's "naturally accommodate emerging patterns of communication," Zhang urges, by identifying data by itself, rather than its location, thus transforming it "into a first-class entity."

"The current Internet secures the data container," the project description continues. "NDN secures the contents, a design choice that decouples trust in data from trust in hosts, enabling several radically scalable communication mechanisms such as automatic caching to optimize bandwidth."

Zhang has a history of shaking things up on the 'Net. She coined the term "middlebox"—a reference to features that sort of popped up around the original IP framework, like firewalls and web proxies. Now NSF has given her $1.5 million to evaluate this NDN concept for its scalability, security, and privacy via testbeds, simulations, and theoretical models.

Mobility first

Rutgers University Professor of Electrical Engineering Dipankar Raychaudhuri has a somewhat parallel NSF project underway. He and his colleagues are working on a "clean-slate future Internet architecture" called "Mobility First." The framework will serve the 'Net as it moves further beyond the old PC/host client/server model and towards a mobile environment.

Among the key components of the design are a system for separating naming and addressing "via a fast global dynamic name resolution service" and a "separate network management plane that provides enhanced visibility."

Dr. Raychaudhuri and his team have received $2,730,000 for this research. The results, they hope, "will provide architectural guidance for cellular-Internet convergence, and are expected to influence future technical standards in the networking industry."

A single network

Lixia Zhang's statement warns that the Internet has "stretched initial assumptions, often creating tussles that challenge its underlying communication model." In a similar vein, NSF grantee Dr. Peter Steenkiste of Carnegie Mellon's proposal worries that the 'Net is under "enormous pressure."

"There is a growing diversity of use models, an urgent need for trustworthy communication, and a growing set of stakeholders who must coordinate to provide Internet services," he explains. Thus Steenkiste and his team propose a new eXpressive Internet Architecture (XIA). It will function as "a single network that offers inherent support for communication between diverse principals including hosts, content, services, and unknown future entities."

For each of these principals, XIA will define a "narrow waist"—that's IP talk for a strategically limited number of functionalities—each of which will include an API.

"The outcome of the project will be knowledge about a potential future network architecture that is inherently trustworthy, supports long-term evolution of network use models and network technology, and provides explicit interfaces for interaction between network actors," Steenkiste's abstract boldly promises. "The architecture will also enable greater visibility and control for various stakeholders, including users, ISPs, and content owners."

The NSF is funding this venture to the tune of $3,835,185.

A safer cloud

Last but not least, there's Professor Jonathan Smith of the University of Pennsylvania, who defines his long-term ambition as "the creation of useful distributed computing systems."

Smith and his NSF project colleagues are huge fans of cloud computing, but see security risks as a big damper on its development and expansion. And so they propose NEBULA—"a potential future Internet architecture providing trustworthy networking for the emerging cloud computing model of always-available network services."

This new framework will tackle all the big challenges, among them using cryptography to verify that authorized data paths were properly followed.

"The NEBULA architecture removes network (in) security as a prohibitive factor that would otherwise prevent the realization of many cloud computing applications, such as electronic health records and data from medical sensors," the abstract concludes. "NEBULA will produce a working system that is deployable on core routers and is viable from both an economic and a regulatory perspective."

Smith's team has been given $1,472,876 to get this idea going. All these ambitious projects have two- or three-year trajectories.

Hat tip to Networkworld.com.