The Internet is out-growing its original design. Evidence for this is widespread and the problem is affecting all the various stakeholders in different ways. End users are plagued by security worries; operators are spending ever more effort to mitigate the effects of address space depletion and the limitations of current inter-domain routing protocols; enterprises face complex trade-offs when trying to ensure resilience through multi-homing or protection from distributed denial-of-service attacks, and application developers have a mountain to climb in order to circumvent the presence of middleboxes in the end-to-end path. It is now the right time to develop a new design that is cognisant of the competing technical, economic and social demands that must be met by the global information network.

The aim of the Trilogy project is to develop new solutions for the control architecture of the Internet and remove the known and emerging technical deficiencies while avoiding prejudging commercial and social outcomes for the different players. The focus is the generic control functions of the Internet - the neck of the hour-glass but for control. Our architectural design activities focus on a radical approach to develop a Future Internet for the next 20+ years. This design is tempered and refined by considering the need for incremental deployment.