On requirements and challenges of future network nodes

In spite of substantial amount of work on rapid service creation, active networking and modular routers, the convergence of routers and computers has not taken place. Instead, network nodes continue to be built either as routers or as end-systems, with new network services pushed even further out of routers and being offered over application layer overlays between end-systems. We conjecture that the inherent simplicity that end-system based overlays offer the network service creator (programmer) will continue to drive network services to end-systems. Still, end-system based overlays introduce significant management complexity, and fail to exploit underlying (hardware) capabilities, both specific hardware support and increasing agility of the lower layers. In this paper, we describe our work on router architectures and the requirements that we foresee future network nodes must satisfy to provide the simplicity that service programmers desire while effectively exploiting capabilities of the lower layers. The architecture incorporates end-systems, boundary gateways, and routers, however, isolating the details of nodal facilities from application and service programmers. The architecture is designed to self-configure and self-optimize each node, fully exploiting the hardware facilities at each node and across a network of nodes, without explicit instructions from network programmers. We discuss the elements of the architecture, the components we have constructed, and the challenges in realizing the remaining elements and ultimately in assembling them into an integrated networking system