acm sigcomm

We argue that the biggest problem with the current Internet architecture is not a particular functional deficiency, but its inability to accommodate innovation. To address this problem we propose a minimal architectural “framework” in which comprehensive architectures can reside. The proposed Framework for Internet Innovation (FII) — which is derived from the simple observation that network interfaces should be extensible and abstract — allows for a diversity of architectures to coexist, communicate, and evolve.

This paper advocates a different approach to reduce routing convergence—side-stepping the problem by avoiding it in the first place! Rather than recomputing paths after temporary topology changes, we argue for a separation of timescale between offline computation of multiple diverse paths and online spreading of load over these paths. We believe decoupling failure recovery from path computation leads to networks that are inherently more efficient, more scalable, and easier to manage.

This paper presents AIP (Accountable Internet Protocol), a networkarchitecture that provides accountability as a first-order property.AIP uses a hierarchy of self-certifying addresses, in which eachcomponent is derived from the public key of the correspondingentity. We discuss how AIP enables simple solutions to sourcespoofing, denial-of-service, route hijacking, and route forgery. Wealso discuss how AIP’s design meets the challenges of scaling, keymanagement, and traffic engineering.

As anyone who has operated a large network can attest, enterprise networks are difficult to manage. That they have remained so despite significant commercial and academic efforts suggests the need for a different network management paradigm. Here we turn to operating systems as an instructive example in taming management complexity...

The Internet has evolved greatly from its original incarnation. For instance, the vast majority of current Internet usage is data retrieval and service access, whereas the architecture was designed around host-to-host applications such as telnet and ftp. Moreover, the original Internet was a purely transparent carrier of packets, but now the various network stakeholders use middleboxes to improve security and accelerate applications.