Towards a compelling new Internet platform

Networking researchers complain that the current Internet is ossified, i.e. that it can hardly be changed. We believe that one of the fundamental reasons for that is the lack of appropriate incentives for providers to invest in new technology, especially in the absence of a compelling new architecture and a killer application that would benefit from an alternative architecture. There is a chicken-and-egg problem: In order to come up with exciting new applications, there needs to be an infrastructure supporting them. Researchers have proposed to build network testbeds (e.g. GENI/FIRE) to test new network architectures and protocols at larger scale. However, these testbeds appear to have little attraction for users, in particular for commercially oriented application developers. OpenFlow is an alternative approach enabling experimental protocols in production networks. However, one of its limitations is lack of addressing provider incentives. In this position paper, we therefore sketch the characteristics that we think a new Internet platform should have in order to be compelling. We argue for a platform that offers rich programmability at low performance cost and that separates traffic to enhance security and limit interference among applications. Moreover, the platform should be open and accessible to a wide community of users and have a high usability in terms of being easily programmable by application developers. Finally, we believe the new platform should provide support for running sophisticated applications across multiple provider domains.