NeTS: Small: Collaborative Research: From Intentional to Enacted Values in a Future Internet Architecture: Values in the Next Phase of Named Data Networking Research

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

Named Data Networking (NDN) is a long-term research effort that aims to redesign the underlying architecture of the Internet. This collaborative project studies NDN's impacts on social issues such as privacy, intellectual property, law enforcement, governance, and policy. It uses a cooperative research approach, in which social scientists work alongside the NDN team of networking researchers. Project outcomes will include a detailed report on critical social, cultural, and economic considerations for the design of NDN, and future network architectures more generally. Other expected outcomes include technical changes to the NDN architecture based on this set of considerations and through cross-disciplinary dialogue. The project advances Values in Design (ViD) research by investigating the distinction between values intended in the NDN core architecture and values enacted in its implementation(s). The research questions are: 1. How will the NDN application choices reaffirm or reshape values in the NDN architecture? 2. How do values embedded in architecture become enacted in application design and use? 3. What social issues are bound up in NDN technical problems? 4. How can values-in-design perspectives help solve these technical problems? 5. What interventions and strategies encourage values conversations within the technical work of infrastructure design? The project addresses these five research questions using qualitative methods and targeted technical interventions. Further, joint research on four technical challenges - naming, trust management, congestion management, and evaluation metrics - enable values-sensitive perspectives to directly influence new technical innovation. Attention to values issues in active, ongoing NDN research advances networking research by supporting technical innovations in these key areas that are driven by the interdisciplinary discoveries of this project. Considering potential social, policy and cultural impacts of the NDN architecture while it is still in development will shape an Internet that not only works more efficiently and provides increased reliability and trustworthiness in communication, but also fundamentally supports privacy, democracy, and equity of information access. The project's impacts will include new methods to evaluate future internet architectures (FIA). There are common challenges for FIA beyond NDN based upon both physical realities (e.g. congestion) and social values (e.g. security, privacy). This project will generate both policy and technical means to address these challenges, first for NDN, but with the potential to be adapted and adopted by other architectures. Finally, this project will further encourage socially-responsible design of emerging technologies by creating and testing better methods for engaging network architects in ViD dialogues. It facilitates the involvement of a broader range of fields in the NSF FIA program and network architecture research.