Recent Internet research has been driven by two facts and their contradictory implications: the current Internet architecture is both inherently flawed (so we should explore radically different alternative designs) and deeply entrenched (so we should restrict ourselves to backwards-compatible and therefore incremental improvements). In this talk, we try to reconcile these two perspectives by first identifying the fundamental omission in the current architecture, which makes architectural evolution hard, and then redressing this omission with a backwards-compatible incrementally deployable architectural framework called Trotsky, in which one can seamlessly deploy radically new designs. We show how this can lead to a permanent revolution in Internet architecture by (i) easing the deployment of new architectures and (ii) allowing multiple coexisting architectures to be used simultaneously by applications. Trotsky thus enables both architectural evolution and diversity.
Joint work with James Murphy McCauley, Barath Raghavan, Brian Kim, Aurojit Panda, and Scott Shenker
Yotam Harchol is a postdoctoral scholar at UC Berkeley, working at the NetSys group with Prof. Scott Shenker. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. His research is focused on network middleboxes and virtual network functions: He works on making them faster, smarter, cheaper, and easier.