In the early days of the Internet it was a marvel to see a message sent from someone in another part of the world. We learned that we could communicate with people anywhere, even if they were not at their desks. Today, we have more diverse devices connecting to the Internet and in sensor networks, and we have devices communicating with other devices. In this issue of the IETF Journal, Carsten Bormann, JP Vasseur, and Zack Shelby describe the aspects of this phenomenon that are being worked on in their article, “The Internet of Things” (this page). Samita Chakrabarti goes into a bit more detail on how IPv6 Neighbor Discovery can be optimized in these types of low-power networks in her article on page 12.
Even as we look at new types of networking activities, we should not lose sight of the need to maintain and expand basic network infrastructure. Kevin Chege illustrates how extra capacity can change the way people can use the Internet in his article, “Impact of New Undersea Capacity on KENET and East Africa” (page 16).
There is, however, a lot more work in different parts of the stack. At IETF 78, not only was there a celebration of the DNSSEC signing of the DNS root zone, an Internet Society-organized panel explored how the DNS is likely to evolve now that DNSSEC is here (see page 8).
To round out this issue we take a look at how to best streamline the standards process (page 7), we get introduced to the Internet Society Fellows who attended IETF 78 (page 10), and we honor Jianping Wu, recipient of the 2010 Jonathan B. Postel Service Award (page 9).