An overview of technical developments and advancements for the future of networking

Abstract

It has been forty years since TCP/IP was standardized as RFC 793. The spectacular success of the Internet has validated the design choices of its protocols and architecture. However, the evolution of the services and applications running over the Internet, new societal requirements and the general unavoidable obsolescence of any protocol will at some point require rethinking the current protocols and potentially replacing them with new ones. New technology has emerged in limited domains networks, such as data centers, that may hint at a way forward for the overall Internet architecture. We present an overview of the recent and current work on post-IP networking and discuss the drivers and motivations that will push us to reimagine IP.