The Network Empowered Internetwork (NEI): An Architecture Overview (Extended Version)

After classifying internetworks into type internetworks, protocol internetworks, and organization internetworks, this paper focuses on the last of these. A key problem with organization internetworking is global routing scalability. In developing the NEI architecture to address this problem, some basic mechanisms/tenets of IP internetworking are upended. In NEI, internetworking addresses are not assigned to hosts or gateways (or even their interfaces); instead a four-tuple vector of independently administered intra-organization addresses, stub organization identifiers, transit organization identifiers, and country codes is used. With this basic change, DHCP, ARP and longest-prefix matching are no longer required. Another basic tenet for recent work on location/identifier separation, which is that stub organizations should be given provider independent addresses to minimize changes required when such organizations change their transit providers, is also confronted. A holistic solution that takes a “design-for-change” approach allows for a draconian rule of only allowing provider aggregatable addressing for stub organizations. It leverages the location-dependent fourtuple concept and combines this with careful DNS resource record structures, and DNS cache updates. Multihoming, mobility, and transit provider changes in NEI are also described.