UC Santa Cruz

The current Internet architecture requires applications to transparently bind and manage network addresses and ports. This design creates and exacerbates several problems for the current Internet as well as its future evolution. These problems and challenges include (1) network address mobility and multihoming; (2) future Internet evolution; (3) service- or content-centricity; and (4) adding, subtracting, or evolving the layers in the network stack.

To address all of these problems, this thesis introduces a novel approach to Internet naming and addressing, which we call hidden identifiers. Hidden identifiers enable applications to semantically express the exact network resource they desire, and allows the operating system to subsequently bind and manage all other network concerns. In this manner, we provide integrated support for all the problem-cases enumerated above while simultaneously simplifying the network API presented to applications.

We introduce, implement, and evaluate HIDRA, the first network stack architecture based on hidden identifiers. We show that this network stack provides integrated support for features such as network mobility and multihoming, and explain how the HIDRA architecture can support a wide range of semantic bindings. Finally, we show how this feature can be leveraged to support the goals of information-centric networking on top of the existing TCP/IP network stack by slightly modifying DNS and HTTP.