Researchers and engineers building Future Networks should read the recent report from the EC’s FIAch Group on the “Fundamental Limitations of the Current Internet and the path to Future Internet”.The report explores the limitations of the current Internet and it's architecture considering data storage, processing, transmission and control functionality. The report's contention is that change in architecture can be achieved by over-dimensioning and gradually increasing functionality but this will not solve the fundamental challenges. The report has a network centric emphasis but does nicely consider the demands of services and media-centric applications in the Future Internet. A broad set of restrictions are described including aspects such as the inability to handle failure reporting, discriminating misbehaving hosts, insufficient dynamic capacity for phenomena such as flash crowding and the necessary flexibility and dependability to support Internet scale critical infrastructure and real-time interactive applications. The report defines a set of high-level and low-level architectural design objectives that are proposed to augment current Internet architectural principles. A motivating report for holistic research that concludes by saying:

"Extensions, enhancements and re-engineering of today’s Internet protocols may solve several challenging limitations. Yet, addressing the fundamental limitations of the Internet architecture is a multi-dimensional problem. Improvements in each dimension combined with a holistic approach of the problem space are needed."