What will the future Internet look like?

09 June 2017

To tackle this all-important question in the Digital Age, the research Institute IMDEA Networks, in collaboration with University Carlos III of Madrid, has just celebrated its 9^th Annual Workshop under the motto: «Enabling future internet applications: networking, privacy and security challenges».

It is expected that by 2020 there will be over 50 billion devices connected to the Internet with powerful sensing and computing capabilities attached to them. This will enable the visions of the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart environments in which people, things, devices and actuators will constantly interact with each other, blurring the differences between the cyber and the physical worlds. However, there is no clear picture yet about what the future Internet will look like. Current stakeholders (including ISPs, CDNs and cloud providers) as well as new players will have to adapt to new applications and networking paradigms. This will require them to anticipate and face a wide range of unknown challenges, stemming from the need to efficiently interconnect heterogeneous devices while guaranteeing service, security and users’ privacy.

The 9^th Annual IMDEA Networks Workshop that has taken place on June 7^th and 8^th 2017 at University Carlos III of Madrid, has brought together industry players, practitioners and academic researchers to share experiences, discuss technological trends, present recent advances and confront the societal, economic, technological and security challenges to be addressed in order to make the future Internet a reality.

The event program included talks from industrial and academic experts, who discussed privacy and security aspects of current technologies, such as the Internet of Things and mobile computing, as well as the importance of promoting transparency and developing new regulatory frameworks to protect users against malicious agents and online abuse.

The workshop also covered how different stakeholders have to adapt to the evolving nature of the Internet, and to the requirements of new business cases and emerging technologies.