A critical momentum is building to push the current architecture of the Internet forward. Several substantial “Future Internet” initiatives have started in Europe, the US and Asia, and vendor and network operator communities have started to actively discuss the topic. Several proposals ranging from incremental changes to the current Internet to completely new architectures are under consideration.

Within these communities, however, a disconnect exists between the people designing the internetworking layers and the people designing methods for supporting end-to-end data transport. This situation is problematic, because in the end, the benefits visible to average users depend on the robust interoperation of the end-to-end transports used by applications in concert with the behavior of the internetwork layer. For instance, identifier-locator separation may cause locators to be changed in a manner that causes TCP to treat associated effects as congestion. It is hence critical to engage in a discussion on how to maximize the synergies between a future internetwork architecture and future end-to-end transport.

This perspectives workshop brings the community of researchers and engineers experienced in current and next-generation internetworking architectures together with the community developing the Internet’s end-to-end transport protocols. The goal of the workshop is to begin a dialog between the communities that will allow a Future Internet to deliver real performance and service-quality benefits to its users and services.

Prospective workshop participants should be interested in:

• new communication paradigms and network architectures
• cross-disciplinary motivations for new architecture – social, commercial and economic
• applications enabled or improved through advanced networking and transport mechanisms
• performance characteristics of new communication protocols and network architectures
• availability and robustness aspects of new architectures
• handling of unwanted traffic
• transition and deployment aspects of new network architectures
• formal principles of architecture and transport

The focus of this perspectives workshop is on discussing these issues among the participants, rather than conference-style presentations. Among the desired results of this workshop are the identification of main architectural concepts and building blocks, the identification of the main remaining research issues, the identification of erroneous assumptions and misunderstandings between the involved research communities and an attempt at a synthesis of ideas into one thought framework.