An Evolvable Internet Environment

The end-to-end characteristic of Internet enables easy deployment andmodification to the application layer protocols running on host. And the competitionamong these applications promotes the development of the Internet. However, newprotocols related to core network layer or network forwarding equipment are hard todeploy, which hinders the evolution of the core network technology. To solve thisproblem, this paper proposes an Evolvable Internet Environment (EIE), which runs asa opened programmable platform and provides a mechanism for normal networkresearchers (not only the equipment vendors like Cisco and Juniper) to implement anddeploy new network architectures or try their new ideas on the forwarding device andoperate the hardware resources on it. EIE supports incremental deployment andprovides a collaborative experimental environment for academia, industryachievements. With EIE, various Internet architectures or protocols can plugthemselves into EIE network forwarding equipment and run simultaneously forexperiment and actual development. Architectures upon EIE coexist with each other,they can use a competitive relationship to solve a same problem, or use acomplementary relationship to solve different problems. During the competition,some of them maybe succeed or eliminated under natural selection. EIE uses suchcompetition to promote the evolution of the core network.This paper preliminarily implements the EIE prototype at the end. And in theexperimental section, the paper also proposes a lightweight source address validationsolution for the SEcure Neighbor Discovery environment. In this way, the ability ofEIE to support new protocol development, deployment and maintenance is verified.