A better Internet without IP addresses

The Internet has evolved from a small network of research machines into a world-wide network for sharing information. The importance of the Internet on commerce, industry, and education has become so profound that world leaders have labeled Internet access as a utility vital to civilization. With such a vitally important role, network researchers must ensure that the Internet is able to expand and scale to serve the needs of the generations to come. To do so, we must overcome two of the most pressing technical obstacles. First, we are rapidly running out of available addresses to identify machines on the Internet. The Internet Protocol version 4, or simply IPv 4, can uniquely identify 4.3 billion machines. However, about 88% of the IPv4 address space has been assigned with projections of exhaustion in as little as two years. The second major hurdle is that routers, which forward packets from a source machine to a destination, may soon not be able to store all the required packet forwarding state while still providing expedient packet delivery. While researchers have previously examined these issues, each of the previous works addresses only a subset of these problems rather than addressing the difficulties holistically. In this dissertation, we seek to address these top concerns in a consolidated manner while allowing for Internet evolvability. The architecture we propose uses host names already used by Internet users for identifying machines and translating them to autonomous system numbers (ASNs), a well-accepted identifier for administrative domains in the Internet. While the host names provide a vast number of end-host identifiers, the ASNs offer an order of magnitude faster packet forwarding performance at the routers. Combined, they ensure that the Internet can meet our demands for decades to come.