The Self-Managing Future Internet powered by the current IPv6 and extensions to IPv6 towards “IPv6++” — A viable roadmap Scenario for the Internet Evolution Path

In this paper, we report on some perspectives we give on how to create a viable Evolution Path towards Self-Managing Future Internet via a “standardizable" and commonly-shared architectural Reference Model for Autonomic Network Engineering and Self-Management. We present a Scenario on how the Self-Managing Future Internet can be developed via a viable Evolution Path that starts with today\´s network models, architectures, protocols such as IPv6 (in particular) and paradigms. The scenario then goes on to define the incremental changes and concepts necessitated and guided by a unified, holistic, commonly-shared, architectural Reference Model for Autonomic Network Engineering and Self-Management that needs to be developed and standardized first, as a starting point to creating the Evolution Path towards the Self-Managing Future Internet. This evolution of today\´s network models, architectures, networking paradigms and protocols such as IPv6 (towards IPv6++) must be guided and necessitated by the architectural Reference Model. The Scenario is a “what-if” type of Scenario that presents solid and realistic steps that define an evolutionary roadmap to achieving a very advanced feature-rich Self-Managing Future Internet by 2015, which can continue to evolve beyond that time frame. The ongoing activities of the EC funded FP7-EFIPSANS Project (http://www.efipsans.org/) are geared towards this goal.