Creating a name-based network API.

Therapid growth of the internet has made it a victim of its own success.The routing architecture is facing multiple challenges such asscalability, mobility, multi-homing, and inter-domain trafficengineering¹.Much of this is caused by the network operators need for providerindependent (PI) addressing rather than provider allocated (PA)².PA addressing aggregates well and hence scales well. PI addressinghowever breaks the hierarchical aggregation model of PA addressing.

Tosatisfy the needs of the operators, yet still maintaining a scalableaddressing paradigm, we propose name based addressing. By providingthe end users with a name based network-API³,the hosts can break the shackles of the underlying address paradigmand communicate using names instead. The name oriented socketprovides this indirection, presenting only names to the applicationsand managing the underlying addressing.

Thisindependence allows end hosts to multi-home and to be mobile whilekeeping a stable name. Addressing independence also means that thenetwork operator does not need to keep an PI address space and isfree revert to using PA addresses.

This project is a cooperation between Ericsson Research in San José, and SICS.

 

1 Tony Li (Editor). Design Goals for Scalable Internet Routing. Work in progress, July 2007.
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-irtf-rrg-design-goals-01

 

2 David Meyer, Lixia Zhang, and Kevin Fall. Report from the IAB Workshop on Routing and Addressing.
RFC4984.

 

3 Christian Vogt. Simplifying Internet Applications Development With A Name-Based Sockets Interface
http://christianvogt.mailup.net/pub/2009/vogt-2009-name-oriented-sockets.pdf