Towards incremental deployment of diverse network architectures on the Internet

In the past decades, many clean-slate future network architectures have gained limited deployment in current Internet, due to the stability and rigidity of TCP/IP, the narrow waist of the Internet. We first propose three principles that the future Internet architecture should obey to be well-defined network architecture, i.e. supporting service innovation and enabling evolvability. By abstracting different modes from TCP/IP network and SDN technology, we argue that the centric-distributed-centric (CDC) mode has great potential for the well-defined future network architecture in which diverse network architectures could be incrementally deployed and coexist with each other. Prototype system regulated by CDC mode was developed. Experimental results reveal that CDC can support diverse architectures to coexist in the current Internet and thus enables the Internet to evolve.