Routing Namespace Patterns

In this paper, we adopt the more and more accepted view that future inter-networks will consist of a rich and diverse collection of networks with multiple and potentially incompatible namespaces. In contrast to today’s Internet, there would not exist a single global namespace federating all the networks. The main design challenge in such a catenet is to offer global connectivity over a heterogeneous environmentwithout having to design dedicated translation and resolution mechanisms between all possible network-pairs. In this context, “inter-network routing” implies that given a certain destination name or address, one has to find the corresponding network among “the sea of networks” that compose the catenet. In this paper, we describe a strawman design for performing universal inter-network routing: our generic solution is based on self-classifying names using Unix regular expressions to both advertise and enable “namespace patterns” lookup across a heterogeneous internetwork.