This coupling between architecture and infrastructure means that any significant architectural change involves sizable costs for vendors (for development) and network operators (for deployment), creating a significant barrier to architectural evolution.
advocate decoupling architecture from infrastructure by leveraging the recent advances in SDN, the re-emergence of software forwarding, and MPLS’s distinction between network’s core and edge. We sketch our design, called Software-Defined Internet Architecture (SDIA), and show how it would ease the adoption of various new Internet architectures and blur the distinction between architectures and services.
The goal of this paper is simple: to change architectural evolution from a hardware problem into a software one. And our solution is rather standard, borrowing heavily from longstanding (e.g., MPLS) and emerging (e.g., SDN) deployment practices.
As mentioned previously, the only components involved in the interdomain task are the edge controllers (one per domain) and the edge routers (whose knowledge of the interdomain task comes only in the form of the forwarding actions received from the edge controller).
[2] D. G. Andersen, H. Balakrishnan, N. Feamster, T. Koponen, D. Moon, and S. Shenker. Accountable Internet Protocol (AIP). In Proc. of SIGCOMM, 2008.
[8] A. Ghodsi, T. Koponen, B. Raghavan, S. Shenker, A. Singla, and J. Wilcox. Intelligent Design Enables Architectural Evolution. In Proc. of Hotnets-X, 2011.