Current Internet has become an essential communication infrastructure, not only used for information transfer but also as a key component of social infrastructures, such as e-government, energy/traffic controls, finance, learning, health, etc. Even though the Internet has evolved into such an essential infrastructure, its future application depends on how it is going to cope with several concerns on different aspects such as scalability, ubiquity, security, robustness, mobility, heterogeneity, Quality of Service (QoS), re-configurability, context-awareness, manageability, data-centric, economics, etc. Over the last years a discussion about how to overcome upcoming Internet's limitations has been initiated. From an academic point of view, one could incline for a revolutionary or clean-slate way of solving the problem by fully redesigning the overall Internet architecture. From a more practical point of view, one tends to incline for an evolution of the current Internet as it is by patching its leaks and deficiencies when trying to serve as the basis for the development of novel services demanding constricting requirements.
This project will tackle the Future of Internet from both perspectives (revolutionary and evolutionary) in order to understand the benefits and disadvantages of each approach and be able to compare them. Additionally, the project will take into account solutions thought to improve three important lacks of the current Internet: energy efficiency, heterogeneity of information and coexistence of networks. In order to do so, two technologies have been identified as potential solutions to some of these problems: i) Media Independence and ii) Virtualization. On the one hand, Media Independence enables the decoupling of physical and overlay infrastructure by introducing an abstraction layer between link and network layers. On the other hand Virtualization enables the creation of overlay networks spanning multiple technologies and realms, hence being a very useful tool for context-aware service composition.

The objectives of the project are: 
Objetive 1: Define and specify the architecture of the Future Internet from the revolutionary and evolutionary point of view, by identifying the problems in the current network architecture to meet the society needs and proposing alternatives to its fulfillment in coexistence with the current Internet. 

Objetive 2: Identify and specify use cases in two scenarios, one based on single operator and another based on multiple operators, to be analyzed from both revolutionary and evolutionary points of view. These use cases will be in the context of the transmission of media over Internet. This objective is a tool that provides objective parameters allowing the comparison of both approaches. 

Objetive 3: Analyze and validate the solutions proposed by these two architecture approaches to the previous two use cases scenarios, in the context of service composition, network virtualization and media independent layer.  In service composition, the goal is to identify and define atomic functions or roles and compositing mechanisms to provide personalized, context-based services to heterogeneous, highly dynamic environments. In network virtualization, the goal is to model and evaluate network mapping strategies to optimize performance based on quality of service, resources usability and energy efficiency. In media independent layer, the goal is to abstract the management functionality to enable it in a media independent way, by studying and validating the media independent management concepts in a set of specific technologies such as IEEE 802.11 or IEEE 802.16. 

Objetive 4: Show and spread the proposed architectures and the corresponding proposed solutions by mean of dissemination and publicationsof the results.