Guest editorial - The next-generation internet

he Internet Technology series is published in May and October every year. The series deals with survey and tutorial articles on current research issues relating to Internet technology. Over the years, there have been a steady and increasing number of submissions to this series, indicating a strong interest in its topics among our readers. This time, 13 papers were submitted for possible publication in this issue. After a rigorous review process, only three were accepted for this issue. The next-generation Internet will be characterized by large numbers of devices, high speed, and multiple services over the same network. IPv6 is the next generation of the IP protocol and has been developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force to allow a large number of IP addresses. A number of countries are already testing IPv6 services, and many service providers have adopted multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) to allow multiservice capabilities for users. GMPLS allows integration of the emerging optical networks for providing high bandwidth with MPLS into a common framework. Tatipamula, Le Faucheur, Tomohiro Otani, and Hiroshi Esaki, in their article “Implementation of IPv6 Services over a GMPLS-Based IP/Optical Network,” discuss the next-generation architecture for the transport of IPv6 services with GMPLS as the technology for the network backbone. The Internet has long been the target of attack by hackers by Denial of Service attacks. Gao and Ansari, in their article “Tracing Cyber Attacks from the Practical Perspective,” present a brief survey of the most promising recently proposed schemes for tracing cyber attacks. They describe in detail the IP traceback scheme, which aims to locate the actual source of attack packets. Mobile IP provides a framework for allowing user mobility between IP networks. It is a network layer solution consisting of handoff and location management for mobile users. However, it does not provide quality of service (QoS) guarantees and hence lacks the support of seamless intradomain mobility. Mouftah, Taha, and Hassanein provide an excellent survey and comparison of Mobile IP extensions that have been proposed to enhance the QoS functionality of Mobile IP. The quality of this series depends on the quality of papers and the stringent refereeing carried out by a large number of volunteers. We would like to thank the authors and reviewers for their time and dedication to this series. We also invite potential authors to continue submitting high-quality papers. We would like to acknowledge the help of Editor-in-Chief Roch H. Glitho and the IEEE editorial staff, Joe Milizzo and Sue Lange, for helping with the production of this series. We welcome any comments you may have to further improve the quality of this series.