Panel

Autonomic and Opportunistic Communications in the Future Internet

The design of the Internet protocol architecture emphasizes, among other aspects, the well-known end-to-end principle which has fostered innovation at the edges and led to the wealth of services available today. The Internet infrastructure---consisting of routers and numerous close-to-invisible services (e.g., DHCP, DNS)---provide the substrate enabling global communications. Well-connected servers run by ISPs, ASPs, businesses, and private users and, increasingly, P2P nodes offer the globally available applications on top. While Internet communications have been dominated by always-on connectivity over recent years, user mobility has increasingly been challenging this assumption: coverage, accessibility, performance, and cost are some of the limitations inherent to wireless communications. Dynamically formed communities of partially (dis)connected mobile users relying on autonomous and opportunistic communications and fully distributed information sharing could parallel and complement the traditional Internet, taking the end-to-end principle and user empowerment to the extreme. This panel will explore options how such new developments could fit into, interact with, and influence a future Internet architecture and prevalent communication paradigms.