Today I got to listen to Dr. Raj Jain in person, giving a talk on Internet 3.0 (a term he coined). He was was talking about what he though were the problem with today’s Internet and what he thought the new architecture would have – learning from our past experiences.

While there were may interesting aspects he covered under the GINA (Generalized Internetworking Network Architecture) like

• Seperation of ID and address
• Virtual seperation of control and data
• Packet and Circuit swithing at differnt levels of abstraction for QoS. Best of both worlds – circuit and packet switching.
• Many more, you can see the full talk here.

The most interesting thing was the architecture itself. For most of the issue today we have work around – be it firewalls (port blocking!), shortage of IP (NAT), etc. As he pointed out the foundation should be strong and broad so that implementers and user can then pick and choose what they want to implement or use. The more limited the scope the more we force the network onto the final user. Ideally the network have fundamental concepts that allow users to develop or use any kind of service that they want.. hard problem but solvable. All we need to do is distill the core concepts as building blocks that can then be used any way the user deems fit.