Logistical Networking: When Institutions Peer

In this paper we present the Logistical Networking principles and the tools we developed to support our ideas. Logistical Networking is defined as the global scheduling and optimization of data movement, storage and computation based on a model that takes into account al the network´s underlying physical resources. We introduce then the Internet Backplane Protocol (IBP), a middleware created to allow the sharing of storage resources, implemented as part of the network fabric, the exNode, a data structure that aggregates storage allocations on the Internet, and the L-Bone, a directory service of distributed storage resource.