VIMNet - A dynamic virtual modularized NETwork architecture

The Internet has become the largest and most highly used global communications network in the world. Despite its functionality and high usage, it has shortcomings in a multitude of areas, including quality of service (QoS), security, robustness, availability, reliability, management, extensibility, and adaptability, and it has ossified. The current requirements of network applications are vast and change drastically from one network application to the next. This can not be provided by a static monolithic protocol architecture; a dynamic multidimensional protocol architecture is needed. It is envisioned that future networks will be comprised principally of very high speed wireless, multi-gigabit speed Ethernet and single as well as multi-wavelength fiber. Leveraging the power of these extremely high speed mediums and the power of virtual circuit based technologies, a dynamic protocol stack framework, VIMNet, that uses protocol modules is being designed.