An Architecture for a Diversified Internet

As the Internet has grown, it has developed in ways never anticipated by its original designers, leading to a growing mismatch between the needs of users and network operators and the capabilities that are directly supported by the Internet architecture. Making fundamental changes to the Internet architecture has become increasingly difficult, due to the significant capital investment required to effect major change and the need for universal agreement before fundamental improvements can be usefully deployed. There is a growing recognition that virtualization offers a means to break this impasse, making it possible for new network architectures to co-exist within a common infrastructure. This project explores the implications of making virtualization a central architectural component of a new Internet architecture, with the explicit objective of encouraging a diversity of end-to-end networks. The creation of such a diversified Internet has the potential to break down the barriers to entry that currently inhibit innovation in networking and enable competitive forces to operate more freely, stimulating the development and deployment of new network technologies and advanced applications. The project explores how virtualization can be integrated into the Internet architecture and how it can be delivered, by multiple cooperating organizations, on a large scale and with sufficiently high performance to make it economically compelling. The project activities include development of a complete architectur