New generation Internet and the evolution towards active and programmable networks

The success of the global Internet has created some problems to network designers and network management personnel. The traffic increase and its very nature (which is self-similar) necessitated revising in a drastic manner the plans for Internet development. Moreover, different forms of information (notably multimedia) have created a need to stress quality of service requirements allowing request for special treatment of certain traffic flows. Efforts in that direction include resource reservation signaling protocol (RSVP), integrated services architecture and differential services. All these developments led thinking about a new generation Internet in general general an Internet 2 initiative for the universities and research communities. A base for these developments is the implementation of vBNS (very high speed Backbone Network Service). For the Internet 2 project, a separate project called Abilene is expected to supply its backbone. Also, a new Internet protocol IPv6 is expected to support: both unicasting and multicasting, prefix routing and aggregation, an increased minimum transfer unit, and an expanded addressing scheme. Emphasis is also an real-time applications with the introduction in the application layer of the real-time streaming protocol (RTSP). Finally, with the need for mobile access to the Internet, the existing protocol is being modified to take these requirements into account.