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June 19th 2003
Computer Laboratory > Research > Systems Research Group > NetOS > Seminars > June 19th 2003

FooArch: Building a 3 layer over-over-over-and-out network

Richard Gold

In response to the architectural stress that the internet is currently experiencing there have been various proposals to redesign the fundamental structures of the internet to "future-proof" it against such shortcomings. Two modest proposals are Plutarch from Cambridge & SelNet from Uppsala. Both use the idea of having homogeneous address spaces linked together by translation functions. This enables the network to cope with the stagnation of the internet in terms of coping with mobility, security, new protocol deployment and hetereogeniety in terms of addressing. Both proposals have been published [1] & [2] and even implemented [3] but a significant demonstration of the benefits of such network architectures has yet to be done.

One potential demonstration is using a FooArch system to bridge the functionality gap between a sensor network and a distributed file system. A sensor network is typically extremely resource-constrained devices participating in a data-centric rather than node-centric network architecture. This is quite a substantial difference compared to the typical powerful desktop PC and its full TCP/IP stack. We would ideally like to have distributed file system semantics for accessing the data collected from the sensors but this is incompatible both resource consumption-wise and architecturally. However by using a FooArch approach we could use a translation mechanism to allow the sensor network to export its presence into the distributed filesystem. The sensor network, which may be using an anycast semantics, could then be addressable from the distributed filesystem.

We propose an implementation strategy which would allow the usage of the Planet Lab as an emulator for a lossy or heavily-delayed network and a translation mechanism based upon the previous work done on Plutarch and SelNet.

Work done in collaboration with Christian Tschudin, Andy Warfield and Jon Crowcroft.

[1] "Plutarch: An Argument for Network Pluralism", Jon Crowcroft, Steven Hand, Richard Mortier, Timothy Roscoe, Andrew Warfield. In proceedings of the Future Directions in Network Architecture SIGCOMM 2003 Workshop.

[2] "Network Pointers", Christian Tschudin and Richard Gold. In proceedings of the first workshop on hot topics in networking (HotNets-I) 2002.

[3] "LUNAR - Lightweight Underlay Network Ad-hoc Routing", Christian Tschudin and Richard Gold. Uppsala University technical report