When your smartphone and iPad are sitting on your kitchen table, it seems pretty reasonable they should be able to talk to each other directly. Except that communicating within the cloud means a lot of travelling. When you send a file to yourself via email, to transfer it from your phone to your tablet, that data signal must travel to a server somewhere before landing in your inbox. Lixia Zhang, a professor of computer science at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), is leading a research project for a new Internet architecture that would cut down on a lot of data travelling. Called the Named Data Networking (NDN) project, the new architecture would replace today's...