Motivated by limitations in today's host-centric IP network, recent studies have proposed clean-slate network architectures centered around alternate first-class principals, such as content, services, or users. However, much like the hostcentric IP design, elevating one principal type above others hinders communication between other principals and inhibits the network's capability to evolve. This paper presents the eXpressive Internet Architecture (XIA), an architecture with native support for multiple principals and the ability to evolve its functionality to accommodate new, as yet unforeseen, principals over time. We present the results of our ongoing research motivated by and building on the XIA architecture, ranging from topics at the physical level ("how fast can XIA go") up through to the user level.

With the growing number of proposed clean-slate redesigns of the Internet, the need for a medium that enables all stakeholders to participate in the realization, evaluation, and selection of these designs is increasing. We believe that the missing catalyst is a meta network architecture that welcomes most, if not all, clean-state designs on a level playing field, lowers deployment barriers, and leaves the final evaluation to the broader community. This paper presents Linux XIA, a native implementation of XIA [12] in the Linux kernel, as a candidate. We first describe Linux XIA in terms of its architectural realizations and algorithmic contributions. We then demonstrate how to port several distinct and unrelated network architectures onto Linux XIA. Finally, we provide a hybrid evaluation of Linux XIA at three levels of abstraction in terms of its ability to: evolve and foster interoperation of new architectures, embed disparate architectures inside the implementation's framework, and maintain a comparable forwarding performance to that of the legacy TCP/IP implementation. Given this evaluation, we substantiate a previously unsupported claim of XIA: that it readily supports and enables network evolution, collaboration, and interoperability -traits we view as central to the success of any future Internet architecture.

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We revisit the long-standing problem of providing network QoS to applications, and propose the concept of judicious QoS -combining the cheaper, best effort IP service with the cloud, which offers a highly reliable infrastructure and the ability to add in-network services, albeit at higher cost. Our proposed J-QoS framework offers a range of reliability services with different cost vs. delay trade-offs, including: i) a forwarding service that forwards packets over the cloud overlay, ii) a caching service, which stores packets inside the cloud and allows them to be pulled in case of packet loss or disruption on the Internet, and iii) a novel coding service that provides the least expensive packet recovery option by combining packets of multiple application streams and sending a small number of coded packets across the more expensive cloud paths. We demonstrate the feasibility of these services using measurements from RIPE Atlas and a live deployment on PlanetLab. We also consider case studies on how J-QoS works with services up and down the network stack, including Skype video conferencing, TCP-based web transfers, and cellular access networks.

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