Towards a Unified Internet Control Architecture

While the Internet has radically changed business and society over the past decades, its architecture has hardly evolved. Therefore, pressure from new applications, business models and networking technologies is distorting the architecture to a degree that requires a redesign. This paper presents two fundamental principles to redesign the Internet architecture. Firstly, the three fundamental building blocks reachabililty, resource control and socio-economic control must be unified to enhance flexibility while preserving its simplicity. Second, the architecture itself must be designed to evolve at run-time. The combination of these two principles will significantly enhance the reliability, robustness, manageability and functionality of the Internet, and will create new and varied business opportunities based around a common core architecture.