The relentless growth of the Internet has brought with it inevitable, and inextricable, economic and social dependence on this infrastructure. In reality, the dependence is mutual: without a robust source of economic support, the Internet will be unable to evolve toward the potential it quite imaginably holds. However, the Internet is quickly approaching a critical architectural inflection point, which must be present in any network using the same architectural assumptions, and reaching the same size, as the Internet. Most experts agree that the existing data network architecture is severely stressed and approaching its capability limits.
The project has three related and clearly defined focus areas: 1) execute the next step on the path toward construction of practically acceptable next-generation routing protocols based on more scalable and mathematically rigorous routing algorithms obtained recently in theoretical computer science; 2) validate the applicability of the above algorithms against several sources of real Internet topology data with the emphasis on scrupulous measurement of critical statistical and graph-theoretic characteristics of the Internet topology; 3) build and evaluate a model for Internet topology growth, which reflects fundamental laws of evolution of large-scale networks.
The project constitutes a promising example of multi-disciplinary research, intersecting networking, theoretical computer science, and physics, and increasing the flow of knowledge between the affected research communities. In particular, some results in all the focus areas will have impact far beyond the realm of the current Internet. They will be elegantly generic in nature and dramatically increase fundamental understanding of not only the traditional Internet and data networks, but also of many other types of self-evolving large-scale systems, such as biological, social, and language networks.
