Today's Internet is under enormous pressure: there is a growing diversity of use models, an urgent need for trustworthy communication, and a growing set of stakeholders who must coordinate to provide Internet services. The project is developing the eXpressive Internet Architecture (XIA), a potential new network architecture that is built around several key principles. First, XIA represents a single network that offers inherent support for communication between diverse principals including hosts, content, services, and unknown future entities. For each type of principal, XIA defines a narrow waist that dictates the API for communication and the network communication mechanisms. Second, XIA rests upon a foundation of intrinsic security in which the integrity and authenticity of communication is guaranteed using XIA's various self-certifying identifiers. Third, XIA enables flexible context-dependent mechanisms for establishing trust between the communicating principals, bridging the gap between human and intrinsically secure identifiers. Finally, recognizing the Internet's central role in our society, economic, policy, and usability considerations play a major role in XIA's design. The project includes user experiments to evaluate and refine the interface between the network and users, and studies that analyze the relationship between technical design decisions, and economic incentives and public policy. The outcome of the project will be knowledge about a potential future network architecture that is inherently trustworthy, supports long-term evolution of network use models and network technology, and provides explicit interfaces for interaction between network actors. The architecture will also enable greater visibility and control for various stakeholders, including users, ISPs, and content owners.
The goal of the eXpressive Internet Architecture (XIA) project is to design a future Internet architecture that is: a. expressive: it should support mutliple different types of communication paradigms without require custom changes for each paradigm b. intrinsically secure: it should ensure security of communication from the ground up c. evolvable: it should be able to seamlessly evolve to accomodate future communication paradigms in a backward compatible fashion. At UW-Madison, the PI and his students focused on: a. developing the necessary data plane support b. understanding how to evolve other key aspects of the archtecture, e.g., the congestion control mechanisms c. building supporting for fast and efficient content-centric processing in the network, and developing higher layer systems that leverage the support effectively. This intellectual merit of this work is the development of novel abstractions for evolvability and intrinsic support, new algorithms for high speed content processing, and new protocols that leverage data plane support to provide more effective support for application-level requirements. The broader impact was in contributing to the PhD thesis of four UW-Madison graduate students, contrubuting to coursework at the undergraduate and graduate levels at UW-Madison, and making the XIA network stack software available for public use and experimentation.
