The internet is flat: a brief history of networking in the next ten years

• Authors: Don Towsley
• Venue: Proceedings of the twenty-seventh ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing
• Year: 2008

The current Internet consists of ten to twenty thousand different interconnected autonomous networks. In many cases these networks have negotiated cumbersome bilateral and multilateral agreements that constrain how data is allowed to flow from source to destination. For example, universities can communicate with each other through the Abilene network but must rely on other networks to communicate with non-academic entities such as Google. These agreements generally impose a loose hierarchy on the Internet with respect to the flow of data and information. The recent development of peer-to-peer file sharing technology, however, has the unintended effect of relaxing and voiding these agreements. This has resulted in a "flattening" of the Internet. In this talk we review the introduction of peer-to-peer (p2p) technology and examine the implications that it may have on the Internet over the next ten years. In particular, we examine the effects of p2p on economics for Internet service providers (ISPs), and the impact on how they manage and engineer their networks. We focus on one p2p technology, "swarming," as exemplified by BitTorrent, and examine how it could further flatten the Internet if it were to become the basis of a "universal swarm" and form the basis of a new data transfer architecture over the next ten years. Last, we present a research agenda centered on swarm technology to make this happen. We will focus in particular on interesting theoretical and algorithmic challenges that will arise with such an architecture.