Enabling a permanent revolution in internet architecture

ABSTRACT

Recent Internet research has been driven by two facts and their contradictory implications: the current Internet architecture is both inherently flawed (so we should explore radically different alternative designs) and deeply entrenched (so we should restrict ourselves to backwards-compatible and therefore incrementally deployable improvements). In this paper, we try to reconcile these two perspectives by proposing a backwards-compatible architectural framework called Trotsky in which one can incrementally deploy radically new designs. We show how this can lead to a permanent revolution in Internet architecture by (i) easing the deployment of new architectures and (ii) allowing multiple coexisting architectures to be used simultaneously by applications. By enabling both architectural evolution and architectural diversity, Trotsky would create a far more extensible Internet whose functionality is not defined by a single narrow waist, but by the union of many coexisting architectures. By being incrementally deployable, Trotsky is not just an interesting but unrealistic clean-slate design, but a step forward that is clearly within our reach.

References

1. David Andersen, Hari Balakrishnan, Frans Kaashoek, and Robert Morris. 2001. Resilient Overlay Networks. In Proceedings of the Eighteenth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP '01). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 131--145.
2. David G. Andersen, Hari Balakrishnan, Nick Feamster, Teemu Koponen, Daekyeong Moon, and Scott Shenker. 2008. Accountable Internet Protocol (AIP). In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2008 Conference on Data Communication (SIGCOMM '08). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 339--350.
3. Tom Anderson, Ken Birman, Robert M. Broberg, Matthew Caesar, Douglas Comer, Chase Cotton, Michael J. Freedman, Andreas Haeberlen, Zachary G. Ives, Arvind Krishnamurthy, William Lehr, Boon Thau Loo, David Mazières, Antonio Nicolosi, Jonathan M. Smith, Ion Stoica, Robbert van Renesse, Michael Walfish, Hakim Weatherspoon, and Christopher S. Yoo. 2013. The NEBULA Future Internet Architecture. In The Future Internet - Future Internet Assembly 2013: Validated Results and New Horizons. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 16--26.
4. Katerina Argyraki and David R. Cheriton. 2005. Active Internet Traffic Filtering: Real-time Response to Denial-of-service Attacks. In Proceedings of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC '05). USENIX Association, Berkeley, CA, USA, 135--148.
5. Steven M. Bellovin, David D. Clark, Adrian Perrig, and Dawn Song. 2005. A Clean-Slate Design for the Next-Generation Secure Internet. GENI Design Document 05-05. (July 2005). Report on NSF workshop.
6. Flavio Bonomi, Rodolfo Milito, Jiang Zhu, and Sateesh Addepalli. 2012. Fog Computing and Its Role in the Internet of Things. In Proceedings of the First Edition of the MCC Workshop on Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 13--16.
7. Matthew Caesar, Donald Caldwell, Nick Feamster, Jennifer Rexford, Aman Shaikh, and Jacobus van der Merwe. 2005. Design and Implementation of a Routing Control Platform. In Proceedings of the 2nd Conference on Symposium on Networked Systems Design & Implementation - Volume 2 (NSDI'05). USENIX Association, Berkeley, CA, USA, 15--28.
8. David Clark, Karen R. Sollins, John Wroclawski, Dina Katabi, Joanna Kulik, Xiaowei Yang, Robert Braden, Ted Faber, Aaron Falk, Venkata K. Pingali, Mark Handley, and Noel Chiappa. 2003. New Arch: Future Generation Internet Architecture. Technical Report. ISI. https://www.isi.edu/newarch/iDOCS/final.finalreport.pdf
9. Jon Crowcroft, Steven Hand, Richard Mortier, Timothy Roscoe, and Andrew Warfield. 2003. Plutarch: An Argument for Network Pluralism. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 33, 4 (Aug. 2003), 258--266.
10. Alan Demers, Srinivasan Keshav, and Scott Shenker. 1989. Analysis and Simulation of a Fair Queueing Algorithm. In Symposium Proceedings on Communications Architectures & Protocols (SIGCOMM '89). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1--12.
11. Seyed Kaveh Fayazbakhsh, Yin Lin, Amin Tootoonchian, Ali Ghodsi, Teemu Koponen, Bruce Maggs, K.C. Ng, Vyas Sekar, and Scott Shenker. 2013. Less Pain, Most of the Gain: Incrementally Deployable ICN. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2013 Conference on SIGCOMM (SIGCOMM '13). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 147--158.
12. Ali Ghodsi, Scott Shenker, Teemu Koponen, Ankit Singla, Barath Raghavan, and James Wilcox. 2011. Intelligent Design Enables Architectural Evolution. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets-X). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 3, 6 pages.
13. P. Brighten Godfrey, Igor Ganichev, Scott Shenker, and Ion Stoica. 2009. Pathlet Routing. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM 2009 Conference on Data Communication (SIGCOMM '09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 111--122.
14. Serge Hallyn, Stéphane Graber, Dwight Engen, Christian Brauner, and Wolfgang Bumiller. 2019. Linux Containers. https://linuxcontainers.org/. (2019).
15. Dongsu Han, Ashok Anand, Fahad Dogar, Boyan Li, Hyeontaek Lim, Michel Machado, Arvind Mukundan, Wenfei Wu, Aditya Akella, David G. Andersen, John W. Byers, Srinivasan Seshan, and Peter Steenkiste. 2012. XIA: Efficient Support for Evolvable Internetworking. In Proceedings of the 9th USENIX Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI'12). USENIX Association, Berkeley, CA, USA, 309--322.
16. Sangjin Han, Keon Jang, Aurojit Panda, Shoumik Palkar, Dongsu Han, and Sylvia Ratnasamy. 2015. SoftNIC: A Software NIC to Augment Hardware. Technical Report UCB/EECS-2015-155. University of California at Berkeley.
17. Yun Chao Hu, Milan Patel, Dario Sabella, Nurit Sprecher, and Valerie Young. 2015. Mobile edge computing - A key technology towards 5G. White paper 11. ETSI.
18. Van Jacobson, Diana K. Smetters, James D. Thornton, Michael F. Plass, Nicholas H. Briggs, and Rebecca L. Braynard. 2009. Networking Named Content. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies (CoNEXT '09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1--12.
19. Teemu Koponen, Mohit Chawla, Byung-Gon Chun, Andrey Ermolinskiy, Kye Hyun Kim, Scott Shenker, and Ion Stoica. 2007. A Data-oriented (and Beyond) Network Architecture. In Proceedings of the 2007 Conference on Applications, Technologies, Architectures, and Protocols for Computer Communications (SIGCOMM' 07). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 181--192.
20. Teemu Koponen, Scott Shenker, Hari Balakrishnan, Nick Feamster, Igor Ganichev, Ali Ghodsi, P. Brighten Godfrey, Nick McKeown, Guru Parulkar, Barath Raghavan, Jennifer Rexford, Somaya Arianfar, and Dmitriy Kuptsov. 2011. Architecting for Innovation. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 41, 3 (July 2011), 24--36.
21. Bob Lantz, Brandon Heller, and Nick McKeown. 2010. A Network in a Laptop: Rapid Prototyping for Software-defined Networks. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (Hotnets-IX). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 19, 6 pages.
22. Taeho Lee, Christos Pappas, David Barrera, Pawel Szalachowski, and Adrian Perrig. 2016. Source Accountability with Domain-brokered Privacy. In Proceedings of the 12th International on Conference on Emerging Networking Experiments and Technologies (CoNEXT '16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 345--358.
23. Dirk Merkel. 2014. Docker: Lightweight Linux Containers for Consistent Development and Deployment. Linux J. 2014, 239 (March 2014), 2.
24. David Naylor, Matthew K. Mukerjee, Patrick Agyapong, Robert Grandl, Ruogu Kang, Michel Machado, Stephanie Brown, Cody Doucette, Hsu-Chun Hsiao, Dongsu Han, Tiffany Hyun-Jin Kim, Hyeontaek Lim, Carol Ovon, Dong Zhou, Soo Bum Lee, Yue-Hsun Lin, Colleen Stuart, Daniel Barrett, Aditya Akella, David Andersen, John Byers, Laura Dabbish, Michael Kaminsky, Sara Kiesler, Jon Peha, Adrian Perrig, Srinivasan Seshan, Marvin Sirbu, and Peter Steenkiste. 2014. XIA: Architecting a More Trustworthy and Evolvable Internet. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 44, 3 (July 2014), 50--57.
25. David Naylor, Matthew K. Mukerjee, and Peter Steenkiste. 2014. Balancing Accountability and Privacy in the Network. In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM Conference on SIGCOMM (SIGCOMM '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 75--86.
26. Erik Nordström, David Shue, Prem Gopalan, Robert Kiefer, Matvey Arye, Steven Y. Ko, Jennifer Rexford, and Michael J. Freedman. 2012. Serval: An End-host Stack for Service-centric Networking. In Proceedings of the 9th USENIX Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI'12). USENIX Association, Berkeley, CA, USA, 85--98.
27. Aurojit Panda, James Murphy McCauley, Amin Tootoonchian, Justine Sherry, Teemu Koponen, Syliva Ratnasamy, and Scott Shenker. 2016. Open Network Interfaces for Carrier Networks. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 46, 1 (Jan. 2016), 5--11.
28. Barath Raghavan, Martín Casado, Teemu Koponen, Sylvia Ratnasamy, Ali Ghodsi, and Scott Shenker. 2012. Software-defined Internet Architecture: Decoupling Architecture from Infrastructure. In Proceedings of the 11th ACM Workshop on Hot Topics in Networks (HotNets-XI). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 43--48.
29. Barath Raghavan, Teemu Koponen, Ali Ghodsi, Vjeko Brajkovic, and Scott Shenker. 2012. Making the Internet More Evolvable. Technical Report. International Computer Science Institute. http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/pubs/techreports/ICSI_TR-12-011.pdf
30. Nikolaus Rath. 2019. libfuse: Filesystem in UserSpace. https://github.com/libfuse/libfuse. (2019).
31. George N Rouskas, Ilia Baldine, Ken Calvert, Rudra Dutta, Jim Griffioen, Anna Nagurney, and Tilman Wolf. 2013. ChoiceNet: Network Innovation through Choice. In 2013 17th International Conference on Optical Networking Design and Modeling (ONDM). IEEE, Piscataway, NJ, USA, 1--6.
32. Raja R. Sambasivan, David Tran-Lam, Aditya Akella, and Peter Steenkiste. 2017. Bootstrapping Evolvability for Inter-domain Routing with D-BGP. In Proceedings of the Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 474--487.
33. Ivan Seskar, Kiran Nagaraja, Sam Nelson, and Dipankar Raychaudhuri. 2011. MobilityFirst Future Internet Architecture Project. In Proceedings of the 7th Asian Internet Engineering Conference (AINTEC '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1--3.
34. David L. Tennenhouse and David J. Wetherall. 1996. Towards an Active Network Architecture. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 26, 2 (April 1996), 5--17.
35. Brian Trammell, Michael Welzl, Theresa Enghardt, Gorry Fairhurst, Mirja Kühlewind, Colin Perkins, Philipp S. Tiesel, and Christopher A. Wood. 2019. An Abstract Application Layer Interface to Transport Services. Internet-Draft draft-ietf-taps-interface-03. Internet Engineering Task Force. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-taps-interface-03 Work in Progress.
36. Yuefeng Wang, Ibrahim Matta, Flavio Esposito, and John Day. 2014. Introducing ProtoRINA: A Prototype for Programming Recursive-networking Policies. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 44, 3 (July 2014), 129--131.
37. Tilman Wolf, James Griffioen, Kenneth L. Calvert, Rudra Dutta, George N. Rouskas, Ilya Baldin, and Anna Nagurney. 2014. ChoiceNet: Toward an Economy Plane for the Internet. SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 44, 3 (July 2014), 58--65.
38. Xiaowei Yang, David Clark, and Arthur W. Berger. 2007. NIRA: A New Inter-domain Routing Architecture. IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw. 15, 4 (Aug. 2007), 775--788.
39. Xiaowei Yang, David Wetherall, and Thomas Anderson. 2008. TVA: A DoS-limiting Network Architecture. IEEE/ACM Trans. Netw. 16, 6 (Dec. 2008), 1267--1280.
40. Pamela Zave and Jennifer Rexford. 2019. The Compositional Architecture of the Internet. Commun. ACM 62, 3 (Feb. 2019), 78--87.
41. Xin Zhang, Hsu-Chun Hsiao, Geoffrey Hasker, Haowen Chan, Adrian Perrig, and David G. Andersen. 2011. SCION: Scalability, Control, and Isolation on Next-Generation Networks. In Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP '11). IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, 212--227.

Index Terms

• Networks

  • Network architectures

  • Network types

    • Public Internet