A Vision of the Next Generation Internet: A Policy Oriented Perspective

Abstract

The host centric design of the current Internet does not recognise data and endusers as integral entities of the system. The first generation of Internet has been very successful and yet business, organizations, governments are finding it difficult to enforce their policies on their networks with the same ease that they do other methods of communications and transport. Ad-Hoc solutions e.g. firewalls, NAT, middleboxes etc, that try to mitigate these issues end up providing localized myopic fixes which often hurt the basic underlying principles of the original design. We envision the future internet to be a dynamic, heterogeneous, secure, energy efficient ubiquitous network flexible enough to support innovations and policy enforcements both at the edge and the core. The first step towards the next generation is the redesign of naming and name binding mechanisms. We, therefore, propose a Policy Oriented Network Architecture (PONA) and an abstract two part protocol stack with a virtualization layer in between. We also introduce the concept of generalized communication end-points - hosts, users, data/services, instantiate the ideas with the Mapping and Negotiation layer and provide an integrated framework for the next generation Internet.