A Virtualized Link Layer with Support for Indirection
Richard Gold
The current Internet today hosts several extensions for ``indirection'' like mobile IP, NAT, proxies, route selection and various network overlays. At the same time, user controlled indirection mechanisms forseen in the Internet architecture (e.g., loose source routing) cannot be used to implement these extensions. This is a consequence of the Internet's semantics not being rich enough at some places and too rich at others. In order to achieve a more uniform handling of indirection we propose SelNet, a network architecture that is based on a virtualized link layer which provides indirection hooks through an explicit resolution mechanism. We discuss the architectural implications of such a scheme and report on implementation progress.
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