We invite paper submissions to the Research Topic on Decentralized Internet Infrastructure - Advances in Network, Edge and IoT Decentralization for publication in Frontiers in Communications and Networks.

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About this Research Topic

This Research Topic aims to publish state-of-the-art research papers and survey articles to present innovative systems, methodologies and trends on the decentralization of the Internet infrastructure. This is motivated to address the following research challenges:

(1) Devolving Internet control. The Internet infrastructure and services are increasingly controlled by a small number of organizations. This occurs in two dimensions, i.e. the services in a protocol layer are aggregated to a small number of providers and the functions across different layers in the protocol stack are aggregated into one function and served by a few giant providers. Excessive concentration may reduce market diversity, hinder competition, discourage innovation, decrease customer choice, and increase risks of surveillance.

(2) Supporting federation of edge resources. The edge devices and things, e.g. smart cameras and autonomous vehicles, are heterogeneous, dynamic and owned by a large number of untrusted stakeholders. Device to device communications between these devices is required to achieve time constrained data processing and machine learning. The Internet needs to provide an infrastructure to enable trusted (or trustless) collaboration between these devices. It also needs to provide an incentivization mechanism to encourage the device owner to contribute their resources.

Potential subjects covered by this Research Topic include, but are not limited to:

The decentralization of:

- Internet architecture, services, and protocols
- Networking, computing, and storage resources and services
- Content delivery services and protocols
- Trust and identity management
- Name resolution and resource / content discovery
- Resource / asset ownership management
- Edge computing

In addition to:

- Decentralized autonomous collaboration mechanisms for the Internet infrastructure
- Decentralized autonomous collaboration mechanisms for edge resources, edge intelligence, and swarm intelligence
- Scalability issues in the Internet decentralization
- Token economy for Internet decentralization
- Measurement of Internet centralization
- Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies for the Internet decentralization
- Privacy enhancing technologies for the decentralized Internet
- Resilience to security threats in decentralized Internet
- Application of artificial intelligence/machine learning for the decentralized Internet
- Managing energy efficiency in decentralized Internet
- Quality of service (e.g. evaluation, representation) of the decentralized Internet

Keywords: Decentralization, Blockchain, Internet Architecture, Network Architecture, Edge Computing, IoT