PSIRP EU project invited to negotiations

25 July 2007 - The proposal Publish-Subscribe Internet Routing Paradigm (PSRIP), submitted in response to the first call of the ICT programme of EU's 7th Framework Programme, has been invited to contract negotiations after clearing the highly competetive technical evaluation with good marks. Thus the project is likely to launch in early 2008.

The project aims to solve present shortcomings of the Internet by proposing a fundamental reform of its paradigms and core technologies. A major flaw in the design of the Internet is its imbalance of powers in the favour of the sender of information: the network accepts anything that the sender wants to send and will make a best effort to deliver it to the receiver. This has led into increasing problems with spam mail and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, forcing companies and users to conceal their E-mail addresses and place their systems behind firewalls. The most severe consequence of this is that the possibilities offered by the Internet are not being utilized.

The project studies the use of the publish/subscribe paradigm (pub/sub) as a remedy to these problems. In this approach, senders publish what they want to send and the receivers subscribe to the publications that they want to receive. Thus, only publishers need to have names. A new Internet architecture, derived from the pub/sub paradigm will be studied and experimented, leading into a redesign of all the layers. In the new Internet, multicast will be the norm and security and mobility are designed into the architecture, rather than added on as after-thoughts.

The new architecture is implemented and feedback from the implementation work is used to refine the architecture. We will make two different implementations: one where pub/sub is run as an overlay over IP (the evolutionary approach) and another, where also the lower layers are redesigned (the revolutionary approach). The architecture and its implementation will be validated by a “red team” working to break it. Also the economic drivers for the new architecture will be studied.

HIIT is the coordinator of the project. Other partners include RWTH Aachen University, British Telecom, Oy L M Ericsson Ab, Nokia Siemens Networks Oy, Institute for Parallel Processing at the Bulgarian Academy of Science and Athens University of Economics and Business. For more information, please contact Dr. Arto Karila.