DIP: unifying network layer innovations using shared L3 core functions

Abstract

The IP protocol has made a great contribution to the development of the Internet and has become the narrow waist of the Internet. However, the fixed packet processing of IP hinders the functional expansion and evolution of the Internet. In order to solve the rigidity of the Internet, our community has proposed various new L3 protocols to better support various network functions at the network layer. In this paper, we propose DIP (Dynamic Internet Protocol), a novel primitive to unify these protocols. DIP builds a common network function core shared by these L3 protocols based on a new L3 function core primitive, named Field Operation (FN). With FNs, each standalone L3 protocol can be decomposed into a combination of multiple FNs, and meanwhile it is feasible to compose various FNs to realize new (derived) L3 protocols. We demonstrate the feasibility of DIP by realizing five radically different network layer protocols1: the canonical IP forwarding, NDN [41], XIA [12], OPT [16], and NDN+OPT (a derived L3 protocol combining the merits of both NDN and OPT). We implement a prototype of DIP and evaluate its forwarding performance.