What should future information environment be like? At present, it is not so easy to answer the question but an inevitable issue. Undoubtedly, Users? requirements and engineering constraints will give a great influence onto the future information environment.Abstract: The authors therefore have started a project named CUE (Coordinating Users? requirements and Engi- neering constraints). The CUE project look up ef- jicient ultra-multi-processing capability with overload -tolerance and maintenabili~y/expandability incorporal- ing run-time reconfiguration as essential requirements lo realize distributed networking systems such as TINA(Telecommunications Information Networking Ar- chitecture) which is being studied aiming at interoperabil- ity, reusability and transparency of applicalion software essentially demanded by users of future infrastructure.To satisfy these requirements from engineering view- points, the CUE project proposes applying to the nek work systems an autonomous decentralized data-driven processor which has been studied by some of the authors through various VLSI realizations. The data-driven pro- cessors adopt autonomous execution control scheme in which packetized data passing through the elastic pipeline including flow-branching/merging mechanisms achieves all data transferring, processing and storing/buffering functions in a completely decentralized manner. The pro- cessor can therefore perform high flow-rate multi-media streams with considerable flow-fluctuations and act as a functional module flexibly adding/removing to/from sys- tem at run-time without any overheads.In this paper, essential requirements to realize the dis- tributed networking environment such as TINA are first discussed. The applicability of our data-driven proces- sor is shown through actual performance evaluations by the latest VLSI systems. Autonomous run-time reconjig- uration scheme in a multi-processor system is also pro- posed to demonstrate potential of the data-driven proces- sor which will be introduced to our data-driven processor currently being designed. Finally, the current status and futvre directions of the CUE project are briefly addressed.