A self-managing addressing, naming and routing service

Abstract

The article presents an operating system for the Internet (OSIx) incorporating notions that appears to be simpler, faster, more scalable and flexible, and provides an infinite effective address (EA), potentially avoiding migration issues, essentially due to a strict principle of localisation. The name space is obtained by linking local directories in a hierarchy using TCP and RTSP (RFC2326) and is made into a global autonomous EA space by interpreting name strings in a filesystem-like fashion, going both up and down the tree. Performance stems from limiting non-leaf lookups to relatively small route tables at each hop and reaching leaves in at most O(log n) hops, closely resembling the interpretation of addresses in IP routing, so that register, reference and discard cycles can be executed at subsecond speeds. A prototype, implemented as a Spring'01 MS project, demonstrated interoperability with IP and DNS by supporting (secure) inbound TCP (talk) and ICMP (ping) using the loopback address range for IP VA.