The silo architecture: exploring future internet design

The architecture of the modern Internet encompasses a large number of principles, concepts and assumptions that have evolved over several decades. In this dissertation, we argue that while the current architecture houses an effective design, it is not itself effective in enabling evolution. In order to achieve architectural flexibility to enable evolution and to explore future Internet design, we introduce the SILO architecture, a meta-design framework within which the system design can change and evolve. We present some insights about architectural research that guided our work, as well as the goals we formulated for our architecture. We then describe that architecture itself, connecting it with relevant prior and current research work. One of the great benefits of SILO is cross-service tuning optimization. We detail our approach to enable cross-service tuning, and then we present sample tuning algorithms, and experiential results. In order to sustain the Internet evolving and to enable others to contribute, we introduce the architectural support for programming (services, tuning algorithms, and applications) within the SILO architecture. We also discuss an early case study on the usefulness of SILO in lowering the barriers to contribution and innovation in network protocols. We validate the promise of enabling change by demonstrating how our recent study supports virtualization, as well as integration with other architectures. Network virtualization has become a new trend in recent years and has been considered an important aspect of network architecture design. However, current understanding of network virtualization is still limited. We investigate the entire spectrum of network virtualization and propose a fundamental way to define network virtualization by using network resources. We also investigate its fundamental resources. In this context, we present a SILO architectural extension for network virtualization. In an effort to promote SILO in deployment, we investigate the integration of the SILO architecture with several other architectures in GENI. IMF functions as SILO's measurement plan, while ORCA works as the resource control plan. We discuss our work and experimental results, and the flexibility of the SILO architecture in working with other architectures. A discussion of various future works reveals our vision of the next steps to exploring the future Internet. SILO shows promise in various aspect, and will be the cornerstone of our future research.