Together with key European research labs that are active on IP networks, the IP networking lab participates in the three-year EU-funded Trilogy collaborative research project that is developing a radical new architecture for the Internet.

Designed from the foundations up, this architecture will give all stakeholders the flexibility to control the outcomes they experience from the network.

Matthew Ford, TRILOGY project co-ordinator and principal researcher in
BT's Networks Research Centre, says; "Evidence that the Internet is
out-growing its original design is widespread, and as a result,
stakeholders are affected in numerous ways. End-users are plagued by
spam and security worries, operators are spending more and more effort
to mitigate the effects of address space depletion, enterprises face
complex trade-offs when trying to ensure resilience through multi-homing
or protection from distributed denial-of-service attacks, and developers
have a mountain to climb in order to ensure their applications work
seamlessly on today's Internet. Now is absolutely the right time to
develop a new design for the Internet that is mindful of the competing
technical, economic and social demands that must be met by a revitalised
network."

Two design principles have enabled the ubiquity and robustness of the
Internet: simplicity and transparency. It has been simple to link any
new network to the Internet, providing instant benefits from the
interconnectivity with a huge range of communicating peers. The
transparency of the Internet has facilitated the deployment of
successively more complex applications and services. Together, these two
attributes characterise the "hourglass" approach to network
architecture. For the Internet, this hourglass approach has led to a
virtuous circle of increased network reach enabling new styles of usage
and vice versa. Unfortunately, this hourglass picture omits the
mechanisms needed for control. TRILOGY therefore seeks to design an
hourglass control architecture for the Internet supporting extremes of
commercial, social and technical control.

"The key is to allow the Internet to be different things in different
places without hindering interoperability," says Lars Eggert, Internet
Engineering Steering Group member, from Nokia Research Center. "By
enabling tussles to play out within the architectural framework, Trilogy
will enable differentiation and a greatly increased communication
heterogeneity that allows for future devices with capabilities that are
very different from today's computers to become first-class citizens of
a Future Internet."

About TRILOGY

TRILOGY is an Integrated Project co-funded by the European Commission
under EU Framework Programme 7. It is a three-year project running from
January 2008 to December 2010. TRILOGY will deliver a coherent set of
changes to the Internet architecture that solve technical and commercial
problems together: a unified control architecture for the Internet that
can be adapted in a scalable, dynamic, autonomous and robust manner to
local operational and business requirements. The interdisciplinary
project consortium consists of 11 partners from industry and academia.

Project co-ordinator: Matthew Ford, Networks Research, BT Group
TRILOGY website including full list of partners:
http://www.trilogy-project.org