Thursday, November 6, 2008

Internet Indirection Infrastructure

This paper proposes an architectural revamping of the Internet to decouple the act of sending and receiving. In this scheme, packets carry identifiers rather than IP addresses - all packets with a given identifier are directed towards an i3 node using a Chord-style mapping infrastructure. Finally, receivers will trigger the appropriate i3 nodes to route packets to receivers with matching identifiers. In addition to using identifier matching at i3 nodes to route packets to the intended destination, partial matches can be used to simplify multicast and load-balancing mechanisms.

One immediate concern with this mechanism, quite like the ones that arose for the previous DOA paper, is that the DHT look-up and intermediate i3 node traversal could significantly hamper the round-trip latency. Implementing reliability mechanisms (i.e., TCP) on such an architecture could also be a mess, as could security complications. Overall, there are some neat ideas presented here (more so than in the DOA paper) but the concept seems quite unrealistic and impractical.

1 comment:

Randy H. Katz said...

I agree that a lot of the paper is about making the scheme work to achieve acceptable performance -- a sure sign that this is actually a huge challenge.