Building a Coreless Internet without Ripping out the Core

Despite an ostensible purpose of connecting networks, the Internet itself has, over the course of the past decade or more, become systemically fragmented. There are many causes of fragmentation, including middleboxes, incomplete peering, and the structure of Internet governance. While fragmentation may be desirable in certain circumstances and for various reasons, it can also be problematic, violating central Internet design principles and rendering routine tasks difficult. We motivate the need for a system designed to facilitate connectivity throughout the Internet, providing the benefits of locality, universal access, and distributed management, while interoperating with the existing infrastructure. Using this system as our context, we explore the somewhat unconventional perspective that the Internet need not have a well-defined core and envision an Internet consisting of a set of loosely-connected fragments, each with its own naming and address space. We explore what we gain and what we lose by taking this “coreless” approach.