The SCION (Scalability, Control, and Isolation on Next-generation Networks) inter-domain network architecture was proposed to address the availability, scalability, and security shortcomings of the current Internet. This paper presents a retrospective of the SCION goals and design decisions, its attacker model and limitations, and research highlights of work conducted in the 5 years following SCION's initial publication.
Serval @cite_29 proposes name-based service discovery and routing, and introduces a new service-access layer that enables late binding of a service to its location. Late binding provides flexibility in migrating and distributing services, yet it attempts to optimize networking for special application-services (especially in data-center network) built on top of the current Internet.
@cite_29
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Internet services run on multiple servers in different locations, serving clients that are often mobile and multihomed. This does not match well with today's network stack, designed for communication between fixed hosts with topology-dependent addresses. As a result, online service providers resort to clumsy and management-intensive work-arounds--forfeiting the scalability of hierarchical addressing to support virtual server migration, directing all client traffic through dedicated load balancers, restarting connections when hosts move, and so on. In this paper, we revisit the design of the network stack to meet the needs of online services. The centerpiece of our Serval architecture is a new Service Access Layer (SAL) that sits above an unmodified network layer, and enables applications to communicate directly on service names. The SAL provides a clean service-level control data plane split, enabling policy, control, and in-stack name-based routing that connects clients to services via diverse discovery techniques. By tying active sockets to the control plane, applications trigger updates to service routing state upon invoking socket calls, ensuring up-to-date service resolution. With Serval, end-points can seamlessly change network addresses, migrate flows across interfaces, or establish additional flows for efficient and uninterrupted service access. Experiments with our high-performance in-kernel prototype, and several example applications, demonstrate the value of a unified networking solution for online services.