Labels and Names taking over Addresses
Christophe Jelger and Christian Tschudin, University of Basel

When the Internet started, addresses ruled the net. Although domain names
and path labels were added at a later stage, these "additions" are now
taking over many tasks formerly performed by addresses. Ultimately,
addresses will become an auxiliary construct rather than a core network
ingredient.

In this talk we describe this ongoing transformation, pointing out how
formerly orthogonal activities like name lookup and routing are now
merging (Caesar et al's Routing on Flat Labels, SIGCOMM06), as well as the
trend towards more and more shortlived IP address allocation coupled with
repeated address translation. In the ANA project (Autonomic Network
Architecture), we anticipate this evolution and envisage a basic
forwarding layer with scope-restricted labels at the bottom, and attribute
sets as extended names at the top. Inbetween, multiple (and potentially
competing) resolution schemes exist inside network instances, as well
across network compartments, which integrate resource discovery and search
with routing. We report on the current state of the discussions.