| The Internet as the communication backbone of a ubiquitous future
must sustain the overwhelming demand and be ready to integrate with
other existing communication systems in human society, e.g, telephone
and cable TV. As a result, we must understand better the global
Internet to enable sophisticated planning. Also, the underlying
communication mechanisms must provide the level of reliability and
quality of services that existing communication systems already
can. We hope that, with thorough understanding of the global
Internet and orders of magnitudes improved simulation technology,
we can realistically replicate the operation of global Internet in
a laboratory environment with a small number of PCs or workstations.
With this powerful tool in hand, we can then systematically analyze
performance changes as extra capacity and buffer are added into
the Internet. The analysis can be transferred into guidelines for
planning. Finally, by continuously sampling the Internet fingerprints,
we ensure that our high-level Internet characteristics can be kept
up to date. Results of this project would not only help in planning
networks, but also provide a set of simulation-based tests on which
protocol designers in many areas, such as integrated/differentiated
service, pricing, wireless, active networking, security, routing,
and congestion control, can perform realistic evaluations. In other
words, this project will ultimately help the Internet make smoother
evolution into a reliable and integratable future. Hence the name
- EvolvNet. In summary, EvolvNet will provide the following
innovations. Within the duration of this project, we focus on the
three short-term topics: Internet characterization, scalable
simulation, and a case study utilizing results from the first two.
|