With speed to the flexible Internet of the future

The “forced digitisation” during the Corona pandemic has shown one thing: What is needed are digital infrastructures that can react highly flexibly to suddenly changing requirements while remaining stable and efficient. The fact that large parts of work and leisure time would take place from one week to the next via video streaming was something that initially only a few had “on screen”.

MAKI spokesperson is Professor Ralf Steinmetz, Head of the Multimedia Communication Lab at the TU Darmstadt. “In cooperation with other universities, we are creating the basis for ensuring that the future network is fit for the Internet of Things, new forms of digital communication and internet services that we cannot even imagine at the present time,” says Ralf Steinmetz.

The big challenge is to ensure that all levels of the network – from physical cabling to application – work together seamlessly and without interruption. For example, the switch between Bluetooth, WiFi and 5G must be successful without any interruption in the data stream. These so-called “transitions” – i.e. seamlessly switching from one mechanism to another – make it possible to create an internet that is always resilient, reliably available, low-latency and very fast, despite increasing data loads. The fact that this is not a matter of course is demonstrated these days by regular failures in the mobile network when many people come together in one place, for example at major sporting events. The benefits of transitions have been proven many times, especially in such scenarios, for example in video streaming or augmented reality games.