Internet Indirection Infrastructure

Attempts to generalize the Internet's point-to-point communication abstraction to provide services like multicast, anycast, and mobility have faced challenging technical problems and deployment barriers. To ease the deployment of such services, this paper proposes a general, overlay-based Internet Indirection Infrastructure (i3) that offers a rendezvous-based communication abstraction. Instead of explicitly sending a packet to a destination, each packet is associated with an identifier; this identifier is then used by the receiver to obtain delivery of the packet. This level of indirection decouples the act of sending from the act of receiving, and allows i3 to efficiently support a wide variety of fundamental communication services. To demonstrate the feasibility of this approach, we have designed and built a prototype based on the Chord lookup protocol.