A new network architecture for the Internet needs ingredients from three approaches: information- centric networking, cloud computing integrated with networking, and open connectivity. Information-centric networking considers pieces of information as first-class entities of a networking architecture, rather than only indirectly identifying and manipulating them via a node hosting that information; this way, information becomes independent from the devices they are stored in, enabling efficient and application- independent information caching in the network. Cloud networking offers a combination and integration of cloud computing and virtual networking. It is a solution that distributes the benefits of cloud computing more deeply into the network, and provides a tighter integration of virtualization features at computing and networking levels. To support these concepts, open connectivity services need to provide advanced transport and networking mechanisms, making use of network and path diversity (even leveraging direct optical paths) and encoding techniques, and dealing with ubiquitous mobility of user, content and information objects in a unified way.

The term “SDN” represents a significant evolution in networking technology and draws attention and support from network operators, vendors, researchers and industry regulators. Contrary to popular belief that SDN is a recent invention, or is related only to IP technologies, the concept of network programmability and control/data plane separation has its roots in the 1960s and 1970s when the telephone network started its transition to digital. Many iterations followed, leading to applications in packet networks and today’s Internet. In this article, we review a number of early works on network programmability that illustrate how several features of SDN emerged progressively over several decades. Our review starts from the early concepts of network control in the telephone network and continues to examine a prolific period of research advancements in the 1990s and early 2000s that led to a number of startup companies that followed, IEEE’s own efforts in standardizing network programmability, and finally the arrival of the OpenFlow standard. We study the importance of this architectural transformation and its influences on modern cloud computing and next-generation networking.

Research in large-scale networking systems has been shaped and will continue to be guided by specific characteristics of applications and the underlying platforms and infrastructures. On the one hand, applications are growing at an accelerated pace, which is fundamentally unpredictable in both breadth and depth. On the other hand, the underlying networking has been the focus of a huge transformation enabled by new models resulting from virtualization and cloud computing. This has led to a number of novel architectures supported by emerging technologies such as Software-Defined Networking (SDN), Network Function Virtualization (NFV), and more recently, edge cloud and fog networking, or network slicing [1] , [2] . This evolution towards enhanced design opportunities along with increasing complexity in networking and its applications has fueled the need for improved network automation in agile infrastructures. At the same time, their complexity has dramatically increased. The networking dynamics have had the effect of making it even more important and challenging to design scalable network measurement and analysis techniques and associated tools. Critical applications such as resource allocation, network monitoring, security enforcement, or dynamic network management require real-time mechanisms for online analysis as well as efficient techniques for offline deep analysis of massive historical data.

Future Internet (FI) research and development threads have recently been gaining momentum all over the world and as such the international race to create a new generation Internet is in full swing: GENI, Asia Future Internet, Future Internet Forum Korea, European Union Future Internet Assembly (FIA). This is a position paper identifying the research orientation with a time horizon of 10 years, together with the key challenges for the capabilities in the Management and Service-aware Networking Architectures (MANA) part of the Future Internet (FI) allowing for parallel and federated Internet(s).