Set top boxes to revolutionise Internet architecture

National ICT Australia (NICTA) has earned a spot in a European Commission project that aims to revolutionise the way information is delivered over the Internet.

The European Commissions 7th Framework Program (FP7) for Research and Technological Development is the $50 billion Euro umbrella under which research-related EU initiatives are housed, and is charged with keeping the EU at the forefront of technological research.

The project NICTA is working on, called Nano Data Centers (NADA), is part of the FP7's future Internet initiative, and has attracted almost AUD$5million in EU funding, with NICTA investing over a quarter of a million dollars in resources.

NADA will seek to build an Internet architecture that delivers data from the edge of the Internet, instead of the network-centric architecture that stores and delivers content from data centers via Internet backbones.

NICTA's Networked Systems Research Group Manager, Dr Max Ott, said the traditional way of delivering online services to the user from huge data centers is a very power and space hungry method that is expensive in terms of hardware, networking and cooling costs.

"If you think of services like video, music, entertainment and MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games), the end device is not necessarily your PC anymore. Rather it is something like a set top box or a game console, especially in Europe where set top boxes are very common in providing a lot of functionality like triple-play services and things like that."

These set top boxes are well ventilated, and are providing more and more efficient output as chip manufacturers create speedier, more energy efficient processors and storage manufacturers create smaller, higher capacity products.

"So why don't we try to take the functionality that we have now in the data center, and distribute it across hundreds of thousands of set top boxes so that we have these 'Nano Data Centers'," Ott explained.

NADA is seeking to leverage advancements in Peer-to-Peer technology to connect the Nano Data Centers to enable them to work together to provide services to end users.

The set top box would essentially be split in two - one half facing the end user with all the typical functionality and services, while the other half acts as the Peer, or Nano Data Center.

"We isolate them using virtualization technologies, and that secure compartment is now talking to all the other set top boxes, co-ordinating and shifting stuff around. Each of the set top boxes has plenty of storage in it so we can put them together and build a massive data store for all those YouTube videos, Flickr pictures or whatever. We're using Peer-to-Peer under the hood to provide a service," Dr Ott said.

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