A virtualized link layer with support for indirection

Abstract

The current Internet today hosts several extensions for indirection like Mobile IP, NAT, proxies, route selection and various network overlays. At the same time, user-controlled indirection mechanisms foreseen in the Internet architecture (e.g., loose source routing) cannot be used to implement these extensions. This is a consequence of the Internet's indirection semantics not being rich enough at some places and too rich at others. In order to achieve a more uniform handling of indirection we propose SelNet, a network architecture that is based on a virtualized link layer with explicit indirection support. Indirection in this context refers to user-controlled steering of packet flows through the network. We discuss the architectural implications of such a scheme and report on implementation progress.