In the previous chapters of this book, we have covered a broad range of networking requirements for emerging wireless scenarios along with the protocol features needed to support them. Clearly, not all of these requirements will be reflected in the general purpose architecture of the Internet, but it may be expected that many of the core capabilities will gradually migrate into main-stream networking protocols that will be in use ten to twenty years into the future. In this concluding chapter, we provide a brief discussion of the roadmap for network evolution or revolution in response to the changes in usage and technology that have been identified in this book.

Although it is impossible to predict exactly how the future Internet of the year 2025 will be realized, we can still enumerate a few alternative scenarios by which the Internet might evolve to meet the many challenges of cellular convergence and mobility. These are:

1. (1) Incremental evolution of IP features: This scenario assumes that the IP standardization process (e.g., IETF and ITU) will anticipate a reasonable set of future requirements and incorporate them into next-generation standards. This would be similar in spirit to IPv6, which improved on IPv4 by providing key features for addressing, mobility, and security. As discussed in Chapter 2, standards processes are already responding to emerging wireless technologies (such as IP-based cellular networks) and usage scenarios (such as multihop wireless access).

2. […]