Abstract

We argue that the current Internet architecture is ill-suited for many emerging applications since they have requirements such as security, group communication, mobility, and quality of service (QoS) that were not considered in its original architectural design. We believe that the root of the current Internet's inability to accommodate requirements of emerging applications lies in the (mis)interpretation of the end-to-end arguments, a set of design principles for placement of function within a system, on which the Internet architecture was built. Further, we articulate a new interpretation of the end-to-end arguments and propose a new network architecture that allows semantic information to be communicated across protocol layers. We present a few service scenarios and demonstrate that the new network architecture can accommodate requirements of emerging applications. We reason about the necessary architectural components of such a network and discuss how they can be put together to create a unified framework that provides support for semantics- and context-aware applications.

@techreport{SCAN-Paper,
author = {Long Le and Sahin Albayrak and Muslim Elkotob and Frank Steuer and Ahmet C. Toker},
title = {Semantics- and Context-Aware Networks: Motivation, Requirements, and Architecture},
month = {October},
year = {2006}
}