Advances in Evolvable New Generation Internet Architecture

Abstract

The current Internet is at the stage of transition to the Next Generation Internet(NGI).For the direction of the NGI architecture,some researchers agree with the "clean slate" approach,and suggest that Internet should be redesigned,but their proposals are difficult to be deployed in the current Internet.Some researchers agree with the "evolutionary" approach,and suggest that we should focus on improving the current Internet,but some of their modifications break the Internet's design principles,creating obstacles for the deployment of new applications.The history of Internet shows that the core mechanisms and design principles of Internet are still strong enough to be used in NGI,while its basic elements should be properly modified(such as the transition from the IPv4 protocol to the IPv6 protocol).Summing up these considerations we believe that the development of NGI architecture should adopt a path called "evolvable",which is a compromise between "clean-slate" and "evolutionary": keeping Internet's core design principles,and carefully change its basic elements in order to accommodate and better support requirements from new applications.This paper analyzes the development trends of the Internet architecture,proposes the definition of evolvability,and puts forward design principles and design constraints of the evolvable Internet architecture.In this analysis,there are problems that should be solved,such as why the proposed core design principles are important,how to determine the boundaries between the design principles and basic elements,how to evaluate the evolvability of an Internet architecture proposed by researchers,etc.To solve these problems,we propose several ideas for the evaluation model of Internet architecture evolvability.Based on these design principles and evaluation models,we further propose the preliminary ideas of designing an IP-based experiment platform for evolvable Internet architectures,in order to help the researchers to test and validate their architecture designs.The key difference between our platform and other network experiment platform lies on that our platform ensures the evolvability of architecture designs,so that these architecture designs can be effectively deployed in the current Internet.