Abstract:

After a generation of development, the Internet has achieved worldwide reach, but some of the earlier design decisions and the accumulation of changes are starting to make further evolution of network services difficult.  In particular, the ever-increasing complexity of network services and debugging threatens to turn regular users into unwilling amateur system administrators.  Security concerns cause ever more restrictive firewalls, leading to a single-service Internet that only supports web access.  New network services, such as predictable quality of service, multihoming, mobility and multicast, have not found wide deployment.  In this talk, we highlight the existing network challenges and call for a more structured development of network services that minimizes user-visible complexity, maximizes network predictability and allows new services to be deployed more quickly.