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Fluidic Networking: Diverse, Decentralized, Dynamic Communication
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| The Internet is arguably the most diverse, decentralized, and dynamic communications medium known to man. Many protocols span many mediums throughout an ever-changing networking topology. Yet the level of diversity, decentralization, and dynamicism the Internet currently supports is nothing compared to what it the future will require. |
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Diversity: Diversity on the Internet is shaped like an hourglass: it is very diverse at the top (as far as applications are concerned) and at the bottom (in physical makeup). However, between these extremes is the bottleneck, where both are limited by the lowest common denominator. |
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Decentralization: While physically decentralized in terms of redundant connections and routers, logically it relies upon centralized decision making and administration capabilities. These centralized bottlenecks prevent the Internet's growth into harsh, ad hoc environments. |
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Dynamicism: The Internet is nearing completion of its original goal to provide a fast, reliable connection between any two computers in the world. However, its original goal did not anticipate the needs of wireless, "occasionally-connected", and highly-mobile computing. |
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| From a physical perspective, the Internet constitutes a tremendously diverse collection of hardware. Likewise, from a digital perspective, the Internet plays host to a huge variety of software protocols. However, either by limitation or design, some hardware blocks certain protocols. Likewise, most protocols fail to take advantage of the full capabilities afforded by the hardware. Thus, protocol developers tend to limit themselves to the lowest common denomenator that is allowed by hardware, while hardware developers focus their efforts on the features used by the most protocols. This homogenizing influence prevents exploiting the full potential of what is technically possible. To counteract this unfortunate trend we must improve the Internet in such a way that high-level protocols and low-level hardware can advertise their needs and match their capabilities directly, thereby bypassing the lowest common denominator. |
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| Although the Internet is technhically and theoretically able to operate in a highly decentralized fashion, in practice it is quite centralized. Physically, the Internet's parallel routing and network fail-over capabilities are limited to major organizations and Internet service providers (ISPs). Digitally, despite the recent excitement about peer-to-peer (P2P) computing, most applications (including all web-based applications) make use of strictly centralized, client-server architectures. Finally, from a political perspective, the Interent is wholly dependent upon centrally allocated IP addresses and DNS names. Thus, despite the flexibility, reliability, performance, and security benefits of decentralization, most hardware, software, and enterprise solutions opt for centralized topologies. We need to improve the Internet in such a fashion that it becomes practical to take advantage of decentralized benefits. |
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| The Internet is said to be a dynamic network in that it can heal, optimize, grow, and reconfigure itself on the fly, without major service interruptions. However, the Internet's dynamic response time is measured in terms of days, hours, and minutes -- nowhere near the sub-second response times required to cope with the growing volume, value, and volatility of upcoming hardware and software solutions. For this reason, the Internet must be improved in such a fashion that applications can reliably and securely communicate in harsh networking environments using such features as seamless handoffs, redundant and parallel connections, and micropayment tunneling. |
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