Designing, implementing and evaluating a new internetworking architecture

“Data is the new soil” – this statement by David McCandless focuses in a single sentence the importance of information in our lives. It outlines the importance of obtaining information, inferring new knowledge and enriching our knowledge through the increasing availability and reachability of massive data sets. Many arguments have been presented as to why the current Internet is not well suited for such a data-centric view of the world. In this article, we focus on the design of an alternative internetworking architecture, regardless of the outcome of this debate. For this, we take a disciplined approach that aligns our design and implementation with a clear set of objectives against which we can evaluate our work. We formulate invariants and main concepts of our architecture that lead to a set of design choices and technologies. For evaluation, we take a multi-pronged approach that combines implementation and prototyping as well as simulation and socio-economics into a suite of methods that aim at evaluating the overall satisfaction of our objectives. We recognize that much work remains to be done to eventually satisfy all our objectives although we strongly believe that our design provides a promising starting point on which a growing research agenda can be built.