GENI and FIND: Revolution or Evolution?
GENI (Global Environment for Network Innovations) and FIND (Future Internet Network Design) are two projects aiming to the next generation Internet. Before we discuss, I would like to introduce two people in here. One is Jonathan Turner, who proposed the GENI backbone architecture. The other is Nick McKeown, who led Tiny Tera project and contributed most design to Cisco 12000 serials.
According to Jonathan Turner, the objective of GENI is to co-exist the current communication media and to get rid of some shortcomings of the current Internet. There will be some devices called “metarouters”, which have many Process Engines (PEs) to handle not only TCP/IP but many other type of media, especially for TDM. Also, GENI will be based on high performance routing and switching, according to Nick McKeown. So, we can have a picture now. The next generation Internet will not only associate with computers. It will be the platform of PSTN and TV networks. That would be owesome!
However, the truth is, we have national wide TDM fiber transfer network, we have legacy ATM backbone transfer network, we have CATV network, and we also have 3G and 4G wireless network. Each of them was in charged by different organizations. To unify all network to one platform seems very hard. Additionally, it’s unrealistic to merge all network over one night.
Do we have chance? The answer is positive since we have already experienced this four decades evolution, especially from early 1990. The evolution will be driven by the Internet users. Some technologies like P2P file transfer, Internet phone and IPTV are popular because of the users. The Internet architecture and core equipments will be improved and some old technology will be obsoleted. The vendors such as Cisco will come up with more devices aiming to the next generation Internet.
