Week 15: Future of the Internet

The Internet is all around us. It is ever-changing and ever-expanding. The potential future of the Internet changes with every passing second. One of the things that I foresee happening to the Internet in the future is a complete overhaul of the structure and way we access things on the Internet. I believe that using TCP/IP as the Internet standard will cease and the new standard will become NDN (Named Data Networking). Here's what I said about NDN in a discussion post during the first few weeks of this class:

"...With Named Data Networking, a user will be able to send out a request for information called an interest packet that the router can store in what’s known as a pending interest table; basically, a holding ground for all requests. From there, the router can scour the web and the multitude of devices connected to it to find the appropriate data that the user wants. Because the data is stored in a data packet that contains a unique name, the router can intelligently locate all instances where the data may be hosted and stream that data directly to the user in bits and pieces. The idea is similar to how the peer-to-peer file sharing company BitTorrent functions in that if you wanted to download a movie, for example, you would do so by connecting directly to other users who transmit fragments of the movie to your own device. Essentially, implementing NDN as the new standard for Internet architecture would turn all devices, files, information, etc. that are connected to the Internet, into a huge indexed database that is accessible by anyone..."

In addition to that, NDN could potentially eclipse the onslaught of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks that seem to plague the Internet lately ever since the method gained popularity in the hacking community. The research teams in charge of the NDN project are also doing some pretty cool stuff that incorporates concepts of Tor (free, open network that allows for anonymous surfing of the web). They hope to be able to provide the same level of anonymity in NDN, while still maintaining its inert low overhead. For more information on the NDN project, check out this site: http://named-data.net/