This article focuses on various future prospects of the Internet. The future networked computing systems will achieve a degree of sophistication and functionality that will make today's Internet appear primitive in comparison. It is indicated that technological advances will enable ubiquitous networked computing in one's day-to-day lives. In future, the application of computing technologies in settings where they are unusual today such as device and appliance networking in the home; faithful capture of scientific experiments in the laboratory and automated full-time monitoring of patient health. The Web already provides a standard interface that can be leveraged to integrate data harvested from these embedded systems. According to the article, most of these future visions are predicted on predictable advances in chip fabrication and radio and sensor design. It is concluded that regardless of which of these complementary visions of a future ubiquitous computing universe emerges first, and when they reveal themselves, it is expected that computing, communications, and the world at large will be changed profoundly by the impending revolution in embedded Internet devices.

Networking engineers increasingly depend on simulation to design and deploy complex, heterogeneous networks. Similarly, networking researchers increasingly depend on simulation to investigate the behavior and performance of new protocol designs. Despite such widespread use of simulation, today there exists little common understanding of the degree of validation required for various applications of simulation. Further, only limited knowledge exists regarding the effectiveness of known validation techniques. To investigate these issues, in-May 1999 DARPA and NIST organized a workshop on Network Simulation Validation. This article reports on discussions and consensus about issues that arose at the workshop. We describe best current practices for validating simulations and for validating TCP models across various simulation environments. We also discuss interactions between scale and model validation and future challenges for the community.