New network capabilities and technologies will generate a continuing flow of new network applications that will lead to significant changes in the conduct of research. If development of high-performance computing and communications technologies in academia and industry continues, network capabilities should expand at rates that may initially exceed the demand generated by the science community.
A national infrastructure capturing the ODN architecture will not be widely deployed if competitive forces alone shape the future; deregulation, along likely lines, will not be sufficient to guide the development and deployment of the ODN architecture … these features will not be incorporated in the evolving national information infrastructure without policy intervention. Needed now is direct action by government to ensure a planned, coordinated start to deploying the access circuit technology for the NII.
A truly open NII cannot be achieved unless the cable TV and/or telephone access circuits are reconstructed in a way that supports the services of both the entertainment and information sectors. Technically, what is needed is a bearer service based on the concept of bidirectional digital packet switching.
The network itself must provide the reliability (availability) that is critical to the delivery of any higher-level service. Today, users view the Internet as reasonably stable, but it is known that it can be seriously disrupted by abuse from an end node, either by gross flooding of the network with traffic or by the injecting of false control packets that disrupt the internal state of the network, for example, the routing tables.
Technology will have to aid in protecting data integrity. It is critical for information creators to know that what they produce is what network users get, and for users to be assured that what they are getting is what they think it is. There must be protection against the dissemination of a work altered without authorization. A technological means is needed for “certifying” the authenticity of the data, so that users are able to choose sources of information with a reasonable degree of confidence.
Effective protection of data and systems will require the use of secure “walls” to separate network functions and service offerings that are expected to be accessible from those that are not. The network must allow information providers to determine the degree of access that will be permitted to their works. The architecture must allow these walls to be constructed so that controlled access through the walls can be implemented.
It has been suggested that numerous electronic devices (such as thermostats and stoves as well as devices explicitly intended for computing and communications) in homes and workplaces could be connected to networks. Some devices may be mobile, some stationary. Thus it is important to remember that names can be used to identify people, devices, locations, and groups.
The Internet and the telephone naming systems’ simultaneous arrival at a crisis suggests that perhaps a common solution can be developed … Developing suitable name spaces for these entities involves issues of scale, longevity, and mobility.
The Open Data Network envisaged by the committee will surely grow to … be capable of interconnecting every school, library, business, and individual in the United States, extending beyond that to international scale. The ability to communicate among such a huge set requires the ability to name the desired communicant.
The issues of scale in the number of nodes are perhaps more challenging that those of speed. As the network gets larger, issues of addressing, routing, management and fault isolation, congestion, and heterogeneity become more relevant. These issues are further complicated by the likely decentralized management structure of the NII, in which the parts of the network will be installed and operated by different organizations. We see in the Internet today that some of the protocols and methods are reaching their design limits and need to be rethought if we are to build a network of universal scale. A major effort is now being made to deal with serious limitations in the Internet’s current addressing scheme, for example.