Future Internet Strategic Research Agenda

Abstract

The ICT SHOK Future Internet programme forms a vital, integral part of the global research effort taking place in Europe, US, China, and elsewhere. We expect that by becoming early developers and adopters of the Future Internet, Finnish companies and academia will gain significant benefits in new markets and scientific results. Two major interlinked changes in the Internet are presently challenging its structure and reshaping its future: the move from the end-to-end principle towards a trust-to-trust principle and from interconnecting nodes towards interconnecting information. Other main change drivers include connectivity, scalability and autonomous resilience. Several present bottlenecks constrict the future progress of the Internet: unwanted traffic, choking of the routing system, mobility and multihoming, compensation and congestion, privacy and at- tribution, and trust and reputation. The major challenges blocking its future development include information networking, energy consumption, changing usage patterns, and the impact of shifting bottlenecks. By solving these problems and addressing these challenges, we progress towards the vision of Future Internet as critical backbone of society connecting users and information. Hence, the mission of the programme is to combine efforts of Finnish companies and academia to make a significant contribution towards developing the Future Internet technology and ecology as a platform for innovation, especially focusing on network and information governance and leveraging mobility as a key source of competitiveness and global added value. To reach the vision, the Future Internet programme must be implemented as a coordinated effort of the participating companies and research groups to ensure maintenance of shared vision and focus, efficient resource utilisation, information flow, and impact. For this, we also propose a number of horizontal actions of the entire programme, designed to complement the individual research lines. These include work on key application drivers and deployment scenarios, and also joint testbeds and larger-scale experiments.