like collaborative 3D immersive environments, new commercial and transactional
applications, new location-based services and so on.
In brief, the question is to determine if the architecture (and its properties) itself might
become the limiting factor of Internet growth and deployment of new applications. For
instance, as stated in [5] “the end-to-end arguments are insufficiently compelling to outweigh
other criteria for certain functions such as routing and congestion control”. On the other
hand, the evolution of the Internet architecture is driven by incremental and reactive additions
[6]. Moreover, studies on the impact of research results have shown that better performance
or functionality define necessary but not sufficient conditions for change in the Internet
architecture (and/or its components); hence, the need also to demonstrate limits of the current
architecture [7]. Thus, scientists and researchers from companies and research institutes
world-wide are working towards understanding these architectural limits so as to
progressively determine the principles that will drive the Future Internet architecture, which
will adequately meet the abovementioned challenges.
The Future Internet (FI) is expected to be a holistic communication and information
exchange ecosystem, which will interface, interconnect, integrate and expand today’s
Internet, public and private intranets and networks of any type and scale, in order to
provide efficiently, transparently, interoperably, flexibly, timely and securely services
(including essential and critical services) to humans and systems, while still allowing for
tussles among the various stakeholders without restricting considerably their choices.
This novel, complex distributed environment may be considered from various interrelated
perspectives: the networks and infrastructure perspective, the services perspective and the
media and information perspective.
Significant efforts world-wide have already been devoted to define, build and validate the FI
and/or some of its pillars. As major representative programs/frameworks towards FI we may
highlight the Future Internet Assembly (FIA) [8] in Europe, the NetSE [9] in USA, the
AKARI [10] in Japan and the Future Internet [11] program in Korea.