Internet flattening and consolidation considered useful (for deploying new Internet architecture)

Abstract

Several new Internet architectures have been proposed to fill the gap between the original design of Internet and its current usage. These new architectures have been studied for more than 15 years, and their technical benefits have been widely validated. However, to date, these architectures have not been deployed in commercial networks. One of the reasons is that current Internet involves multiple players such as content providers and Internet Service Providers (ISPs), which makes it difficult to make significant changes. On the other hand, several studies have shown two trends of the current Internet, consolidation in web content delivery and flattening of the Internet topology. Web content delivery is dominated by the large Content Delivery Network (CDN) providers. Moreover, to improve communication quality, such providers connect directly to the eyeball ISPs, and this results in the flat topology. In this paper, we focus on whether these two trends, i.e., Internet flattening and consolidation, can ease the hurdle for deploying new architecture. Based on the measurements of DNS and network path, we verified the current trend of flattening and consolidation of content delivery on the Internet. We also investigated the incremental deployment scenario of new architecture under this environment. The results showed that a significant amount of traffic can be handled by a new architecture, if only a small set of autonomous systems cooperatively deploy it.