Internet Evolution and the Role of Software Engineering

The classic Internet architecture is a victim of its own success. Having succeeded so well at empowering users and encouraging innovation, it has been made obsolete by explosive growth in users, traffic, applications, and threats. For the past decade, the networking community has been focused on the many deficiencies of the current Internet and the possible paths toward a better future Internet. This paper explains why the Internet is likely to evolve toward multiple applicationspecific architectures running on multiple virtual networks, rather than having a single architecture. In this context, there is an urgent need for research that starts from the requirements of Internet applications and works downward toward network resources, in addition to the predominantly bottom-up work of the networking community. This paper aims to encourage the software-engineering community to participate in this research by providing a starting point and a broad program of research questions and projects.