Towards a service oriented Internet

Today's Internet remains faithful to its original design that dates back more than two decades. In spite of tremendous diversity in users, as well as the sheer variety of applications that it supports, it still provides a single, basic, service offering - unicast packet delivery. While this legacy architecture seemed adequate till recently, it cannot support the requirements of newer services and applications which are demanded by the growing, and increasingly sophisticated, user population. The traditional way to solve this impasse has been by using overlay networks to address individual requirements. This does not address the fundamental, underlying problem, i.e., the ossification of the Internet architecture. In this paper, we describe the design of a new Service Oriented Internet framework that enables the flexible and effective deployment of new applications and services. The framework we describe utilizes the existing IP network and presents the abstraction of a service layer that enables communication between service end-points and can better support requirements such as availability, robustness, mobility, etc., that are demanded by the newly emerging applications and services.