The current Internet is an outgrowth of the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) that was initiated four decades ago. The TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) designed by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn in 1973 did not anticipate, quite understandably, such extensive use of wireless channels and mobile terminals as we are witnessing today. The packet-switching technology for the ARPANET was not intended to support real-time applications that are sensitive to delay jitter. Furthermore, the TCP/IP designers assumed that its end users – researchers at national laboratories and universities in the United States, who would exchange their programs, data, and email – would be trustworthy; thus, security was not their concern, although reliability was one of the key considerations in the design and operation of the network.

It is amazing, therefore, that given the age of the TCP/IP, the Internet has successfully continued to grow by supporting the ever increasing numbers of end users and new applications, with a series of ad hoc modifications and extensions made to the original protocol. In recent years, however, many in the Internet research community began to wonder how long they could continue to do “patch work” to accommodate new applications and their requirements. New research initiatives have been launched within the past several years, aimed at a grand design of “a future Internet.” Such efforts include the NSF's FIND (Future Internet Design) and GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovations), the European Community's FP 7 (Frame-network Program, Year 7), Germany's G-Lab, and Japan's NWGN (New Generation Network).