Enabling a permanent revolution in internet architecture

James McCauley, Yotam Harchol, Aurojit Panda, Barath Raghavan, Scott Shenker

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Recent Internet research has been driven by two facts and their contradictory implications: the current Internet architecture is both inherently flawed (so we should explore radically different alternative designs) and deeply entrenched (so we should restrict ourselves to backwards-compatible and therefore incrementally deployable improvements). In this paper, we try to reconcile these two perspectives by proposing a backwards-compatible architectural framework called Trotsky in which one can incrementally deploy radically new designs. We show how this can lead to a permanent revolution in Internet architecture by (i) easing the deployment of new architectures and (ii) allowing multiple coexisting architectures to be used simultaneously by applications. By enabling both architectural evolution and architectural diversity, Trotsky would create a far more extensible Internet whose functionality is not defined by a single narrow waist, but by the union of many coexisting architectures. By being incrementally deployable, Trotsky is not just an interesting but unrealistic clean-slate design, but a step forward that is clearly within our reach.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationSIGCOMM 2019 - Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages1-14
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9781450359566
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 19 2019
Event50th Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM 2019 - Beijing, China
Duration: Aug 19 2019Aug 23 2019

Publication series

NameSIGCOMM 2019 - Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication

Conference

Conference50th Conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication, SIGCOMM 2019
Country/TerritoryChina
CityBeijing
Period8/19/198/23/19

Keywords

  • Internet architecture
  • Internet evolution

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Signal Processing
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering
  • Communication

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