Abstract

Today’s Internet has been considered as the largest engineered system ever created by mankind, which consists of hundreds of millions of connected individual computer hosts, communication links, and switches. It is a worldwide collection of connected networks that can be accessed by individual computer hosts through different ways, including gateways, routers and switches, dial-up connections, and Internet service providers. Combining with powerful capabilities of distributed computing and communications, the Internet has been serving as a new paradigm of information infrastructure, a mechanism for information dissemination, and a medium for collaboration and interaction between individuals, government agencies, financial companies, academic institutions and businesses of all size without taking into account geographic locations. People and our societies have become increasingly dependent on the Internet for personal or professional uses regardless of whether it is for e-mail, file transfer, remote login, web page access or commercial transactions. Given that the Internet is so large and has so many diverse components and uses, it naturally brings lots of challenges on issues related to architecture, congestion, naming/addressing, interoperability, routing, resilience, dependability, fault tolerant, security and privacy. To achieve a good performance for Internet applications, all these addressed issues above should be considered.