Augmented Internet: An Information-Centric Approach for Real-World/Internet Integration

The Internet contains a lot of information that can be very useful to support users in real-world activities and while on the go. Unfortunately, this information is currently very cumbersome to access and accessing the information disrupts the users' workflow. Internet services that offer those information with a seamless real-world integration are missing. In this paper, we argue that such Internet services are currently difficult to develop on a large scale because conceptual support for such applications is missing. Therefore, we propose a new paradigm, the Augmented Internet, that integrates a conceptual connection between the Internet and the real world into the next generation Internet. Requirements for the next generation Internet are analyzed based on multiple use cases. From this analysis, we conclude that it is feasible and advantageous to implement real-world integration as integral part of an information-centric network approach. To enable this, future information-centric network research has to take some additional requirements into consideration, resulting in minor but critical changes to the information-centric network approach, as will be discussed in this paper.