Minimalistic Internetworking - Meeting the Needs of Tomorrow

Gong Li

PhD, GM of Sun China ERI

The internet conceptually includes everything with a digital heartbeat, and increasingly anything that matters in our lives does have a digital heartbeat, from office equipments, to everyday electronics, to medical devices, to RFID tags, and much beyond. As millions of such devices of a huge variety pour into the world, it is desirable to keep them interconnected, because connectedness is the primary value of the Internet. However, two major factors work against this already daunting challenge -- our technology legacy that pushes things into more complex forms and the business tendancy to fragment the Internet. This talk borrows ideas of how the human world stays connected, draws from past experience in designing P2P networks, and outlines a small number of basic components that would be sufficient to form a minimalistic network that can connect everything yet maintain its simplicity in the face of continued technology innovation.

	Dr. Gong Li
	General Manager, Sun Microsystems China Engineering and Research Institute
	Li Gong is the founding General Manager of Sun China Engineering and Research Institute in Beijing. Previously at Sun, he was a Distinguished Engineer and engineering head of JXTA, Java Embedded Server, and Java security and networking. Out of these work he received six US patents and wrote three books. Prior to Sun, he was with Stanford Research Institute (SRI) International. He did extensive research in distributed systems, and served as Program and General Chair for IEEE S&P, ACM CCS, and IEEE CSFW. He received BS and MS degrees from Tsinghua University, Beijing, and a PhD from the University of Cambridge, England, all in Computer Science. He is Associate Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Internet Computing, and Guest Chair Professor at Tsinghua University and Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications. He was named one of the 2003 China New Economy People by China Internet Weekly and Sina, and received the China Open Source Movement Leadership Award in 2003 given by CCID and the China Software Industry Association.

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