Geolocation-addressable Internet is a research project at the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing. The goal of the research is to develop a conceptual framework of the future Internet where data and services delivered from smart mobile devices are accessible by their geographic location in physical space, instead of by IP addresses or DNS identifiers of their host machines, as is common practice today.
Geolocation-addressable Internet is a vision of the future Internet where data and services are accessible by the physical geographic location they are delivered from, instead of by IP addresses or DNS identifiers of their host machines, as is common practice today. This form of Internet infrastructure is intended for interaction with smart Internet-connected objects spread throughout the environment that provide data and services related to their immediate physical surroundings to remote users or other objects. It enables users or software agents to discover, connect to, and communicate with anonymous and mobile remote objects as long as they are located within a given geographic area.
Geolocation-addressable Internet represents a paradigm shift inspired by the Internet of Things and prediction that in the near future any physical or even living object will be able to act as an Internet host. In such circumstances, we expect that a whole new class of services derived from sensing and acting in the environment will emerge, where main stimulus for users to use a service will be the location of its hosting object, while the actual service provider will be of less importance or even irrelevant. For example, a user sitting at his/her office may connect to an anonymous remote vehicle-mounted camera while driving through a given segment of highway to get an insight into current traffic situation. Digital glasses and similar wearable gadgets carried by their owners may stream a captured live video through the Internet to provide a virtual walk service to remote users. Wi-Fi-enabled smartphones may be queried to inspect the availability of free wireless networks in the neighborhood.
As more and more regular, but also unconventional digital objects become hosts of Internet services, more application domains will benefit from geolocation-based access to remote data sources and sinks. Some of these geolocation-targeted objects will be stuck to fixed location, others will be mobile. Some will be dedicated to operate in 24/7 fashion, others will provide services occasionally. Some of them will be operated by professional organizations, others will belong to individuals’ personal equipment and provide services on a volunteer basis. Due to this diversity, an exact number and identities of service providers available at a given location in a particular moment in time cannot be predicted in advance. Geolocation-addressable Internet enables new paradigm of development of future Internet applications where remote data sources and sinks are specified by location on Earth, street address in the city, or room within the building, without knowing in advance who will actually provide the service. Actual service provider is selected during the application run time from those available at given location when the service is necessary.
The goal of the research is to develop a conceptual framework of a geolocation-addressable Internet and to analyze suitable forms for its implementation as a worldwide-scale technical system. Through modelling, simulations, and prototype development, we experiment with various paradigms and system architectures for delivering and consuming geolocation-addressable Internet services. We analyze them from complexity, reliability, and scalability point of view.
Expected outcomes of the research are:
geolocation-based addressing scheme for geolocation-targeted interaction among smart Internet-connected objects
scalable methods for real time tracking of locations of mobile service hosts
procedures for routing of geolocation-targeted network traffic to best-matching destination hosts within a given geographic range; this includes methods for real-time discovery of candidate destination hosts, algorithms for dynamic selection of the best candidate host, and host selections metrics
methodology for architecting the system infrastructure for geolocation-addressable Internet that enables system designers and system operators to select a proper form of system architecture based on anticipated number of mobile hosts in the ecosystem, expected speed of their movement, and typical territory coverage of geolocation-targeted communication
Along with modelling and simulation of addressing schemes, location tracking methods, routing algorithms, and system architectures for geolocation-tageted communication on the Internet, we are developing a system prototype with smartphones and tablet computers appearing as mobile geolocation-targeted service hosts.
The demo version of the system will be available soon.