A Tentative Design of a Future Internet Networking Domain Landscape

The Future Internet (FI) will dramatically broaden both the spectrum of available information and the user’s possible contexts and situations. This will lead to the vital need of a more efficient use of the Internet resources for the benefit of all. While the Internet has already delivered huge economic and social benefits over its short lifespan, there must be a realignment of how Internet research and investments are made and value is captured for enabling a continuous growth. The increase of available online contents and networking complexity require the exploration, experimentation and evaluation of new performance optimisation approaches for delivering different types of contents to users within different contexts and situations. Several network research areas, such as peer-to-peer, autonomous, cognitive and ad hoc networking, have already demonstrated how to improve network performance and user experience.

Interestingly, there are various Internet-networking research areas and corresponding technologies that were investigated, experimented and progressively deployed, while others emerged more recently. However, there are still open questions such as visualising the conceptual evolution and articulating the various FI networking and computing research areas and identifying appropriate concepts populating such a FI domain landscape. This paper presents a tentative FI domain landscape populated by Internet computing and networking research areas.