EVERGROW, a European Research Project on the Future Internet
by Kersti Hedman
The goal of EVERGROW, an European 'integrated project', is to lead the way to a completely new Internet within a few decades.
The project began with a scientific conference in Stockholm on Friday 30 January 2004. The goal of the project is to build the science-based foundations for the global information networks of the future. Not only will networks soon provide us with access to all the world's knowledge, but society as a whole will become network-based, from private life and business to industry and the processes of government. The demands on the future Internet will be high. We can already see how the complexity of the Internet is continually increasing, and we know a great deal about the problems this will cause. Above all, a number of today's highly manual processes must be automated, such as network management, network provisioning and network repair on all levels.
This new project brings together the best research groups in three main areas: complex systems, peer-to-peer systems and experimental networking. At the scientific workshop, researchers described the tools to be employed and the plans for their deployment in two large measuring programs. These will be launched to chart Europe's network topology and network traffic patterns with an unparalleled resolution in time and space.
Other activities to come out of the workshop included new 'message-passing' algorithms offering the power to optimise the behaviour of extremely large systems, new results in coding theory that take advantage of these algorithms, and the latest developments in both structured and unstructured peer-to-peer services.
EVERGROW will be financed by the EU over four years, and is coordinated by the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS) in Kista, Sweden. It is lead by Prof. Erik Aurell, SICS, and Prof. Scott Kirkpatrick, of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Israel.
Participants include researchers from more than twenty universities and institutes in Europe, Israel and Egypt, and corporations such as Ericsson, IBM, TeliaSonera and France Telecom. Four of the partners are members of ERCIM: Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Spain and the Swedish Institute of Computer Science in Sweden.
Links:
http://www.evergrow.org/
Please contact:
Kersti Hedman, SICS
E-mail: kersti.hedman sics.se
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