TuneInNet - Flooding on the Internet Backbone
Sebastian Dill – 2010
As its rapid growth continues and new applications and requirements arise, the technological advance of the Internet is increasingly limited by the facts and shortcomings of the existing infrastructure. Attempts to address this by incrementally extending or revising the existing standards have met with considerable diffculties, as in the case of IPv6 or Mobile IP. Although this is partly due to economical and practical reasons, the question presents itself if the fundamental technologies underlying the Internet themselves might need an overhaul. Part of the discussion of the future of the Internet thus turns towards clean slate designs, which envision how the Internet would look like if it were re-designed from scratch today. Purposely ignoring practical constraints, clean slate research has the liberty to challenge even the most fundamental concepts of the currentfdesign. TuneInNet is a clean slate design developed at the Freie Universität Berlin and the Universität Zürich. It seeks to banish the intelligence from the network in a more radical manner than the Internet Protocol Suite does, thereby aiming at a backbone that consists of simple, purely optical switches and provides only raw connectivity. In this scenario, data is flooded and ï¬ltered rather than routed based on addresses. This can be construed as a move towards the radio, from which it derives its name: the sender sends data without regard to whom, whereas the receiver filters out - or tunes in to - the data that interests him. This thesis presents and evaluates a prototypical implementation of TuneInNet.