Internet infrastructure

Envisioning a new Internet architecture

The Pouzin Society is a new group being created to rethink the notion of a global online network; “the Internet.” The early material suggests that the body is already thinking of concepts that seem to elevate the Internet from a transport/connection network to a host for complex inter-process communication that sounds more like cloud computing, or an underlying framework for it at least.

This is a topic that’s going to generate a lot of discussion and interest, but remember that we still haven’t even been able to transition to IPv6 from IPv4 after more than a decade of work.

IETF “LISP” initiative could offer users “global” addresses

The new IETF activity aimed at supporting enterprise multi-homing of their Internet connections may be taking a step in a much more valuable direction in the long run. The Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol or LISP is a means of breaking the current link between identifying a user and identifying the user’s location.

LISP effectively provides a kind of hierarchical routing where the primary encapsulation of a packet gets it to the correct network, and from that network it’s then routed to the correct user address on that network. A user, under LISP, would be known by a global “address” independent of the network address, and one that wouldn’t even change if the user changed ISPs.

We believe this could have a profound impact on the way the Internet works and could make IP a more suitable protocol for “infrastructure” services, as well as making its operation less costly. However, it’s clear that there is a lot of opposition to LISP, even in the IETF, and so it’s not at all clear how soon it might be deployed beyond experiments.