The proposed research program will develop and catalyze the core component of a next-generation Internet architecture that greatly increases the functional capabilities, robustness, flexibility, and heterogeneity of the Internet in the face of modern application requirements.
Our approach has two inter-related thrusts. The first is to address the following question: What is the right architecture for the next generation of global networking infrastructure? Because proposing a clean-slate design, or treating this question as a thought experiment, has little chance of practical impact, the second thrust is to build the research infrastructure that allows us to discover, evaluate and deploy this architecture.
Specifically, overlay networks have recently emerged as a promising technique for introducing disruptive technology into the Internet. This focus on overlay functionality has left unanswered the single most critical question: What lies underneath? What is the appropriate minimal, universally shared environment to underlay the overlays?
The core of an underlay that supports an increasing multiplicity of overlay opportunities lies in three key elements. First, there must be some means of information discovery and dissemination through with overlays learn about the underlying Internet; a so-called Information Plane. Second, elevating overlays to first-class objects places special emphasis on the coordinated assignment of complex collections of network resources (e.g., bandwidth, storage, computational cycles, shared information) to competing overlays in an economically coherent, computationally practical fashion. This requires an Economic Framework for resource allocation. Third, there is a complementary question of how to define the basic unit of resource, and the challenges in the implementation of decisions made in resource allocation by means of Virtualization. Combined, these elements form the critical core of an operating environment for overlays; the necessary universal substructure for an overlay-enabled world. These three elements play a pivotal role in this research program: they are both a key objective (output), and at the same time, essential for building a scalable wide-area testbed that allows researchers to evaluate new ideas under real-world conditions.
