Getting back to basics: networking for the Internet

Citation

Schwartz, D.G. (2001), "Getting back to basics: networking for the Internet", Internet Research, Vol. 11 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/intr.2001.17211aaa.001

Getting back to basics: networking for the Internet

Getting back to basics: networking for the Internet

The Second International Network Conference held in Plymouth, UK, served, once again, as a magnet for high quality research on the network-related aspects of the Internet. It seems redundant to have to refer to "network-related aspects of the Internet", in as much as everything these days should be network-related, however, it is clear that there is an abundance of research and development that takes for granted the fundamental networking issues dealt with at the conference.

It is often overwhelming to have to digest the steady stream of new Internet technologies and applications. The core technologies presented in this issue of Internet Research encompass distributed computing, agent security, QoS monitoring, server performance, and more. These research initiatives mean just one thing – that the stream of new Internet technologies and applications will continue to grow at an unprecedented pace, taking us into uncharted waters with increasing demands placed on the existing global networking infrastructure.

The dotcom meltdown of recent months reinforces the need for basic research into new Internet technologies. While one commercial Internet venture or another may be short-lived, the core technologies live on to find new realizations and new applications to call home. My thanks to Dr Steven Furnell, guest editor of this issue, for compiling a fascinating subset of the conference papers that have been expanded for this issue of the Journal.

Also appearing in this issue is a paper by Corradi, Montanari and Stefanelli. While not presented at the Network Conference, their work on the "Security of mobile agents on the Internet" fits in seamlessly with the other papers, in particular, Antonopoulos et al.'s discussion of "Access control for agent-based computing", and Martins et al.'s analysis of "Mobile agent applications". These three papers can be nicely contrasted with the distriblet approach discussed by Finkel et al. in "An applet-based anonymous distributed computing system". Taken together, these four papers form a mini-issue that helps map out the future of Internet-based distributed computation.

David G. SchwartzEditor