A Proposal for Enhancing Internet Naming

Solutions for mobility, multi-homing, support for localised address management (i.e. via NATs), and end-to-end security are functions that Internet users find increasingly desirable. Their respective solutions have not been developed in concert and their combined use may not be harmonious. Meanwhile, the Internet has a number of different namespaces, for example the IP address or the Domain Name. In recent years, some have proposed that the Internet’s namespaces are not sufficiently rich and that the current concept of an address is too limiting. One proposal, the concept of separating an address into an Identifier and a separate Locator, has been controversial in the Internet community for years. It has been considered within the IETF and IRTF several times, but was always rejected as unworkable. This paper takes the position that an alternative approach to using the Identifier-Locator split to evolve the naming in the Internet can provide elegant solutions to the key problems listed above, without changing the core routing architecture, offering practical and deployable engineering solutions. Department of Computer Science University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT, UK A Proposal for Enhancing Internet NamingR. Atkinson (Extreme Networks), S. Bhatti (U. of St Andrews), and S. Hailes (UCL)