Network service abstractions for a mobility-centric future internet architecture

Abstract

The increasing composition of mobile devices and mobile applications in the Internet requires us to revisit the traditional principles of fixed, host-centric communications, when designing a next-generation architecture. To support this major shift, we define in this paper a set of basic service abstractions that should be afforded by a future Internet that is centered upon the notion of self-certifying globally unique IDs (GUID) for all network principals - hosts, content, services, etc. alike. We followup with a specific set of network service APIs that provide full access to the proposed abstractions, and implement these on Linux and Android hosts that connect to an instantiation of the future Internet architecture proposal - MobilityFirst [5]. Using performance benchmarks and the implementation of representative use cases we show that the API is flexible and can enable efficient and robust versions of present and future applications.