Core Internet DHT nodes End − hosts

We attempt to decouple identity from location in Internet hosts. In our proposal, hosts receive flat identifiers in a large and sparse namespace, and an Internet-wide distributed hash table (DHT) acts as a resolver by mapping these flat identifiers to IP addresses in analogy with today’s DNS. Unlike DNS names, the source and destination identifiers appear in packets, in a shim layer after the IP header. Our proposal would change all host software but leave the core routers untouched. The advantages of our proposal are: (1) the benefits of decoupling location from identity, which have been articulated elsewhere (see, for example, [16, 19]) and (2) enhanced middlebox functions. The paper’s focus is the second of these two advantages.