A Flexible Hierarchical Network Architecture with Variable-Length IP Address
Jifan Tang, Wanli Zhang, Xiangyang Gong, Guangpeng Li, Delei Yu, Ye Tian, Bowen Liu, Lei Zhao · 2020
IP experiences dramatic development since its birth and has become the fundamental protocol of the Internet. However, IP faced more and more prominent problems in the past years, such as address exhaustion, low flexibility and low packet space efficiency. The root cause of these problems is that IP protocol is designed with fixed-length address and fixed-length delimited packet format, lacking of extensibility and flexibility. In order to solve these problems, we firstly propose a hierarchical network architecture where network is able to extend naturally without limitation. Then we adopt an addressing scheme based on the hierarchical network architecture. The address reflects the hierarchical levels of network and has no quantity limit. Benefiting from the hierarchical network architecture, flexible packet forwarding which improves the flexibility of address is described, and it helps improve packet space efficiency and interconnect heterogeneous networks as well. Implementation and experiments illustrate the feasibility and flexibility of our scheme compared to conventional IP protocol.