Abstract-Current architectures and solutions are about to reach the limits of sustainable developments. Over the years, many new requirements have emerged, and there are observations pointing to an ever-increasing diversity in applications, services, devices, types of networks at the edge and the access. Meanwhile, the infrastructures for internetworking, connectivity, and also management remain fairly the same. A new paradigm is needed that can support a continuous high pace of innovations in all the different parts and aspects of a communication system, while at the same time keeping costs of deployment and maintenance down. This new paradigm has to embrace current trends towards increased heterogeneity, but on the other hands provide support for co-existence and interoperability between alternative and various solutions all residing within a global communication system. This paper presents a new architectural framework called the Nth Stratum concept, and which takes a holistic approach to tackle these new needs and requirements on a future communication system. Index Terms-Architecture, Framework, Stratum, System I. INTRODUCTION XISTING systems for communication like Internet are challenged by developments occurring at various parts of these systems. Especially towards the edge, new forms of applications, access networks and devices make it increasingly difficult to keep the overall communication system consistent and coherent, as well as to maintain inter-operability. One can observe a fragmentation of the system into different noninteroperable segments. Peer-to-peer technology makes new and fairly independent application-specific networks appear on top of the existing networks as overlays, and generally with nodes in such overlays being at edges. Further to this, core features such as security, mobility, and QoS, are sometimes lacking proper support, which leads to different middlebox and adhoc solutions, and not to forget about the still occurring problems with security attacks, spam, as well as maintaining the overall stability of the routing system. The challenge is an ever-increasing need to support not only a high growth of terminal entities of various kinds but also to support mobility and multi-homing. Cellular networks are challenged by the emergence of alternative and complementary radio access systems. The integration of these different types of networks calls for a flexible architecture framework, especially in view of the fast pace of application and device development. The Internet on the other hand lacks support for mobility, QoS, and security, which are fairly well supported by the cellular networks. However, Internet shows, so far, a clear advantage in supporting application development, making it relatively easier to roll-out new services Considering the status of the current systems for communication as being described above, it does not seem reasonable and feasible to continue with patching those systems with different 'fixes'. Instead we advocate that a new architectural framework is nee...
