An applications perspective into the Future Internet

The building of the Future Internet is well on its way with many research projects and experimental development activities in different parts of the works. However the debate over different approaches is still ongoing. Much of the comparison is concentrating on the different technical capabilities, however, very little effort has been put on finding out how such capabilities will actually be used by the different stakeholders and in particular by users and service providers. Decisions such as whether to take an evolutionary step with TCP/IP, start to use cellular protocols, or develop something new, should be based on realistic and validated user scenarios clearly highlighting what might be needed in the future and indicating a prioritised roadmap. As the Future Internet is needed for supporting new applications and services, it is natural that the requirements for Future Internet should come from the future applications. In this paper, we take a look at a likely future to see what kind of applications can be expected. We then analyse some potential future applications trying to understand the key features the Future Internet should support in order to meet key challenging requirements. Finally, we compare the requirements with the existing Future Internet research, in order to see how they match to each other. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.