In the thirty-odd years since the advent of the Internet architecture, new uses and abuses, along with the realities that come with being a fully commercial enterprise, are pushing the Internet into realms that its original design neither anticipated nor gracefully accommodates. These pressures have revealed several limitations of the Internet architecture, and the Internet's increasing ubiquity and importance have made these flaws all the more evident and urgent. However, it is far easier to complain about the Internet architecture than it is to produce a better design. This proposal accepts that challenge, by proposing a clean-sheet redesign of the Internet. The proposed design is based on a new naming system that names services (or data) and endpoints (hosts) separately from network locations, and incorporates notions of delegation and indirection. Moreover, these service and endpoint identifiers are flat, with no hierarchical structure.
Such architecture naturally handles host mobility, multihoming, and data replication and migration, and incorporates middleboxes in an architecturally clean manner. In addition, it simplifies interdomain routing, by adopting a new global addressing structure that makes explicit the administrative domain to which a host belongs. The interdomain routing protocol exchanges routes based on these flat domain identifiers (instead of today's IP prefixes that cause many problems), together with flexible mappings of flat end-host identifiers, to enable more flexible routing policies for ISPs and hosts.
