Performance evaluation of a DHT-based integrated mobility architecture

Internet population is growing quickly: 1.8 billion people were connected to the Internet at the end of 2009 and this number is expected to grow to 2.2 billions within 2013. Right now, these people are, and will be even more surrounded by heterogeneous devices with advanced networking and rendering capabilities; in their daily life, they will demand a wide set of services and the opportunity to access more and more content in a fast, flexible and reliable way. Notwithstanding, the Internet infrastructure is showing more and more its architectural limitations for what concerns both advanced service provisioning and content fruition. The networking community is beginning to argue that one of the main issues of the current Internet is its own communication paradigm: despite users want to communicate with each other or retrieve content as fast as possible, the communication is still in terms of pair of devices that have to be located and connected to each other. There are two ways of coping with this sort of "ossification" of the Internet. The first one is a clean-slate re-thinking of the network layer aimed at the design of a new L3 protocol able to overcome most of the IP limitations. The second one is an incremental addition of functionalities, mainly at the application layer, on top of the current network infrastructure. In this paper we will focus on what we believe is the common element among these two approaches, namely Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs), able to offer distribution and replication of information, high levels of scalability, resilience and self-adaptation, fast access to time-critical information, and much more.