Tsunami of gadgets threaten Internet capacity

Today, we have some 5 billion networked devices, and with the proliferation of smartphones, tablets and single-purpose devices, that number is expected to rise to some 15 billion within several years. All connected through an increasingly burdened network.

The Internet is rife with inefficiencies, says Lixia Zhang, a computer scientist at UCLA. He told Technology Review, "Today I have on my desk a smartphone, a tablet, and a Mac computer. To move data between them, the request goes all the way to the cloud - God knows where that is - so it can come back here to another device that is two feet away. That is wrong, it is simply wrong."

Zhang's Named Data Networking (NDN) project hopes to change today's Internet architecture. "Today," he said, "you have many data centers that can have thousands of people asking for the same piece of data. An NDN network just finds the nearest copy of that data." The goal is simple. "In the end," said Zhang, "I think we can improve the speed, throughput and overall efficiency."

Some remedies for improving the Internet are large-scale. In 2010, the National Science Foundation's Future Internet Architecture Project began a process to design alternatives to today's Internet. The goal of the project is "is to engage the research community in collaborative, long-range, transformative thinking - unfettered by the constraints of today's networks yet inspired by lessons learned and promising new research ideas..."

But others deal with the problem in a more immediate way. For instance, Akamai's Net Session improves flow in areas with poor connectivity by enabling device-to-device file transfers instead of the usual device-to-server-server-to-device path. The program now runs on 30 million devices - mostly laptops. "The goal is to expand it so it can support mobile handsets, tablets, and media-type boxes at home," says Kris Alexander, director of strategy at Akamai.

Your Gadgets Are Slowly Breaking the Internet (Technology Review, Jan. 9, 2013)
 
NSF Future Internet Architecture Project (website)