Network Architecture Testbeds as Platforms for Ubiquitous Computing

Distributed Systems research, and in particular Ubiquitous Computing, has traditionally assumed the Internet as a basic underlying communications substrate. Recently, however, the Networking research community have come to question the fundamental design or "Architecture" of the Internet. This has been led by two observations: firstly, that the Internet as it stands is now almost impossible to evolve to support new functionality, and secondly, that modern applications of all kinds now use the Internet rather differently, and frequently implement their own "Overlay" networks above it to work around its perceived deficiencies. This paper discusses recent academic projects to allow disruptive change to the Internet architecture, and also outline a radically different view of networking for Ubiquitous Computing that such proposals might facilitate.