Diversifying the Network Edge

The Internet has become an indispensable part of our modern information society. Unfortunately, with success has come a growing ossification in the core technology at the heart of the Internet that severely limits our ability to make fundamental architectural improvements. A recent call to arms advances a research agenda to create a virtual testbed to overcome three barriers to effective architectural research: live testing, deployment and broad-based solutions. Network diversification seeks to make virtualization a central feature of the core network infrastructure. It has the potential to permanently eliminate the problem of network ossification, by creating an environment in which alternate network technologies can be introduced easily, and can co-exist and compete with existing technologies. In this paper, we focus on what network diversification means for the access portion of the network, in particular the end systems that connect to the network and the local area networks commonly used to provide access.