The Internet needs an update. And that’s exactly what the National Science Foundation intends to give it.
At the end of August, NSF announced the Future Internet Architecture program, designed to enhance the reliability, availability and security of the Internet.
As it stands now, the Internet is not designed for wireless devices — cell phones, iPads or Blackberries — said Byrav Ramamurthy, a U. Nebraska-Lincoln associate professor of computer science and engineering, though both the Internet and wireless devices are increasingly relied upon as tools. On mobile devices, the connection is less safe and less efficient, because when the Internet was designed 40 years ago, it was intended for plugged-in computers.
Ramamurthy leads the UNL team of researchers involved in the project. UNL, along with six other universities, make up Mobility First, one of four projects in the FIA program, running from Sept. 2010 through Aug. 2013. Mobility First, a $7.5 million project, is centered around improving the efficiency of the Internet on mobile devices.
More than 4 billion mobile devices are in use today, and by 2014 more than half of all Internet traffic will be from mobile devices, said Dipankar Raychaudhuri, professor of communications at Rutgers-New Brunswick and principal investigator of Mobility First.
Information over the Internet travels on a longer path to reach mobile devices, because the location of the device is not fixed, Ramamurthy said.
“Internet applications don’t know where they (the users) are,” Raychaudhuri said. “The Internet is independent of distance and location.”
Both Raychaudhuri and Ramamurthy stressed that the idea of Mobility First is to rethink and redesign the fundamental architecture of the Internet so that it serves the reality of wireless computers.
“Internet architecture is currently treating mobile devices as second-class citizens,” Ramamurthy said.
But the changes will not create a “new” Internet or replace it, he said, and the changes will not happen overnight.
Already, investments have been made in cell towers for Internet access on cell phones, and technology experts have added capacity to the Internet to accommodate the overall increase in traffic, Ramamurthy said.
The goal is help make sure the capabilities of the Internet continue to grow, Raychaudhuri said, and “helping people live more efficiently.”