A Formal General Framework of Internet Address Mechanisms

The address mechanism is the most essential and important part of the Internet architecture and its evolution determines the capacity of the Internet to accommodate the innovative applications. The traditional IP-based address strategy gets the current Internet into ossification which makes the architectural innovation become a consensus. Many novel address strategies make significant extensions or innovations for the traditional model but lack of common design principles and consistent expression model. It has become difficult to insight into future evolution progress of the address schemes for the diversity and heterogeneity. Moreover, we believe that a diversity address mechanism might coexist in the Internet architecture to meet the ecological evolution of network applications. To tackle the above problems, by researching the evolution of the Internet address mechanisms and abstracting a minimal architectural core, a general framework for accommodating the diversity and heterogeneity of various address strategies is proposed in this paper, including: 1) formal and verifiable conceptual model forms a consistent theoretical framework within which the invariants and design constraints can be expressed; 2) abstract multi-dimensional and extensible interface primitives and interactive patterns with the communication axioms to provide a proof framework for the Internet address schemes; 3) derive working prototype implementations—Universal Engine of Address Schemes which allows us to construct the various address mechanisms with flexibility and support the evaluation, evolution and coexistence of the Internet address strategies, in order to meet the ecological evolution of network applications.