Developing Information Networking Further: From PSIRP to PURSUIT

PSIRP (Publish-Subscribe Internet Routing Paradigm) is an EU FP7 funded project that has developed a clean-slate architecture for the future Internet, based on the publish-subscribe primitives (rather than the send-receive ones), all the way down to the core networking functions. The PSIRP vision is a pure information-centric Internet architecture, possibly providing remedies to many of the current Internet problems. In PSIRP, all is information and everything is about information. Content-based identities, recursive application of ideas, cryptographic techniques, and the Trust-to-Trust principle are all extensively used to achieve the design goals. Furthermore, incentive compatibility and socio-economic considerations are guiding the design from the outset, to ground the project in reality and to provide credible and viable potential deployment paths. The project has developed, implemented, and preliminarily evaluated solutions for rendezvous, topology formation and routing, and information forwarding, with ongoing work currently focusing in experimenting. A new (also EU FP7 funded) follow-on project, PURSUIT (PublishSubscribe Internet Technologies), will refine and further explore and expand PSIRP’s vision. We believe that this will eventually lead to a more complete architecture and protocol suite, thereby providing for more extensive performance evaluation and investigations on scalability. This paper provides an overview of the PSIRP concepts and the developed architecture, along with some key results, and outlines the research directions of the PURSUIT project, focusing on the project goals and its expected outcomes.