Hybrid Transition Mechanism for MILSA Architecture for the Next Generation Internet

Abstract

MILSA (Mobility and Multihoming supporting Identifier Locator Split Architecture) (1, 2) is a new architecture to address the naming, addressing, and routing challenges in the current Internet. It separates the identifier (ID) from locator, separates control from data delivery, and provides comprehensive benefits in routing scalability, mobility and multihoming, traffic engineering, renumbering, and policy enforcements. Currently there is an on-going debate in IRTF (Internet Research Task Force) RRG (Routing Research Group) on several possible evolutional directions. Two typical directions are "core-edge separation" (called "Strategy A" (3)) and "ID locator split" (called "Strategy B") respectively. To address this issue, based on our previous work, in this paper, we present a hybrid transition and deployment mechanism to allow the two strategies to coexist and allow the architecture to evolve to any of the two directions and allow the market to decide the course of the evolution based on technical superiority, business friendliness, ease of deployability and other such factors over the long run. Further, the description of various scenarios and technical analysis show the potential benefits of this hybrid transition and deployment design in supporting long-term evolution and incremental deployability that are important for the Next Generation Internet architecture.