Next century challenges: data-centric networking for invisible computing: the Portolano project at the University of Washington

Computing and telecommunications are maturing, and the next century promises a shift away from technology-driven general-purpose devices. Instead, we will focus on the needs of consumers: easy-to-use, low-maintenance, portable, ubiquitous, and ultra-reliable task-specific devices. Such devices, although not as limited by computational speed or communication bandwidth, will instead be constrained by new limits on size, form-factor, and power consumption. Data that they generate will need to be injected into the Internet and find its way to the services to which the user has subscribed. This is not simply a problem of ad-hoc networking, but one that requires re-thinking our basic assumptions regarding network transactions and challenges us to develop entirely new models for distributed services. Network topologies will be intermittent and services will have to be discovered independently of user guidance. In fact, data transfers from user interfaces to services and back, will need to become invisible to the user and guided by the task rather than explicit commands. This paper outlines a vision of this future and identifies research problems that will require our attention in the areas of user interfaces, distributed services, and networking infrastructure.