Maurizio D¸cina
Politecnico di Milano and ICT Consulting,
Milano, Italy.


The Future of Networking

The talk will focus on the future of information and communication
services delivered through distributed computing and networking
platforms at multiple communication layers. The up-and-coming
information technology systems take indeed the pervasive forms of:
wireless sensor networks, embedded systems (disappearing
electronics), ambient intelligence, wearable computing, etc.
At first we describe the evolution of interoperable applications among
such distributed systems towards the so-called Semantic Web Services.
Then we illustrate the rise of distributed networking at various
layers.
At the Internet Protocol (IP) layer the consensus is on a full IP
wired and wireless network architecture, which allows fully
distributed session control for multimedia services, and the
integration of heterogeneous access networks. Above IP connectivity,
overlay networks are rapidly becoming attractive to provide real time
services, such as telephony and television, as recently shown by
Skype and Joost. Overlay networked services include: content-based
routing, peer-to-peer multimedia, and grid computing applications. On
the other hand, distributed networking takes also place under the IP
routing layer, with the spreading of wireless ad-hoc and wireless
sensor networks. Peer-to-peer discovery and routing, security,
reputation and anonymity are hot research issues common to underlay
and overlay networking with respect to IP routing.
The layered architecture of pervasive computing applications
encompasses indeed four network layers, which should be ideally
designed in a single engineering framework: wireless sensor networks,
IP wired/wireless networks, content-based overlay networks, and
finally the context-aware pervasive applications.
A fifth networking layer, though, relentlessly developed during the
last few years, that is the Social Networks layer realized by the
communities of people interacting via the so called Web 2.0 features.
Web and Blog communities are emerging as attractive catalysts of
social networking, to share user generated content for the creation
of news, business, and entertainment services, such as those of
LinkedIn and YouTube. Cognitive and knowledge-based networked
information systems (such as semantic search engines, and intelligent
agents), as well as, the networked social communities, are
establishing the pillars of the future knowledge-based Information
Society.