Towards evolvable Internet architecture-design constraints and models analysis

Abstract

There is a general consensus about the success of Internet architecture in academia and industry. However, with the development of diversified application, the existing Internet architecture is facing more and more challenges in scalability, security, mobility and performance. A novel evolvable Internet architecture framework is proposed in this paper to meet the continuous changing application requirements. The basic idea of evolvability is relaxing the constraints that limit the development of the architecture while adhering to the core design principles of the Internet. Three important design constraints used to ensure the construction of the evolvable architecture, including the evolvability constraint, the economic adaptability constraint and the manageability constraint, are comprehensively described. We consider that the evolvable architecture can be developed from the network layer under these design constraints. What’s more, we believe that the address system is the foundation of the Internet. Therefore, we propose a general address platform which provides a more open and efficient network environment for the research and development of the evolvable architecture.