Despite the world-changing success of the Internet, shortcomings in its routing and forwarding system have become increasingly apparent. One symptom is an escalating tension between users and providers over the control of routing and forwarding of packets: providers understandably want to control use of their infrastructure, and users understandably want paths with sufficient quality-of-service (QoS) to improve the performance of their applications. As a result, users resort to various “hacks” such as sending traffic through intermediate end-systems, and the providers fight back with mechanisms to inspect and block such traffic. To enable users and providers to jointly control routing and forwarding policies, recent research has considered various architectural approaches in which provider- level route determination occurs separately from forwarding. With this separation, provider-level path computation and selection can be provided as a centralized service: users (or their applications) send path queries to a path service to obtain provider- level paths that meet their application-specific QoS requirements. At the same time, providers can control the use of their infrastructure by dictating how packets are forwarded across their network. The separation of routing and forwarding offers many advantages, but also brings a number of challenges such as scalability. In particular, the path service must respond to path queries in a timely manner and periodically collect topology information containing load-dependent (i.e., performance) routing information. We present a new design for a path service that makes use of expensive pre- computations, parallel on-demand computations on performance information, and caching of recently computed paths to achieve scalability. We demonstrate that, us- ing commodity hardware with a modest amount of resources, the path service can respond to path queries with acceptable latency under a realistic workload. The ser- vice can scale to arbitrarily large topologies through parallelism. Finally, we describe how to utilize the path service in the current Internet with existing Internet applica- tions.

The Named Data Networking (NDN) is a new Internet architecture that changes the network semantic from packet delivery to content retrieval and promises benefits in areas such as content distribution, security, mobility support, and application development. While the basic NDN architecture applies to any network environment, local area networks (LANs) are of particular interest because of their prevalence on the Internet and the relatively low barrier to deployment. In this dissertation, I design NDN protocols and implement NDN software, to make NDN communication in LAN robust and efficient. My contributions include: (a) a forwarding behavior specification required on every NDN node; (b) a secure and efficient self-learning strategy for switched Ethernet, which discovers available contents via occasional flooding, so that the network can operate without manual configuration, and does not require a routing protocol or a centralized controller; (c) NDN-NIC, a network interface card that performs name-based packet filtering, to reduce CPU overhead and power consumption of the main system during broadcast communication on shared media; (d) the NDN Link Protocol (NDNLP), which allows the forwarding plane to add hop-by-hop headers, and provides a fragmentation-reassembly feature so that large NDN packets can be sent directly over Ethernet with limited MTU.

Virtualization on top of high-performance servers has enabled the virtualization of network functions like caching, deep packet inspection, etc. Such Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is used to dynamically adapt to changes in network traffic and application popularity. We demonstrate how the combination of Software Defined Networking (SDN) and NFV can support the parallel operation of different Internet architectures on top of the same physical hardware. We introduce our architecture for this approach in an actual test setup, using CloudLab resources. We start of our evaluation in a small setup where we evaluate the feasibility of the SDN and NFV architecture and incrementally increase the complexity of the setup to run a live video streaming application. We use two vastly different protocol stacks, namely TCP/IP and NDN to demonstrate the capability of our approach. The evaluation of our approach shows that it introduces a new level of flexibility when it comes to operation of different Internet architectures on top of the same physical network and with this flexibility provides the ability to switch between the two protocol stacks depending on the application.