Towards a Common System Architecture for Dynamically Deploying Network Services in Routers and End Hosts

The architectural simplicity of the core Internet is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, its agnostic nature paved the way for endless innovations of end-to-end applications. On the other hand, the inherent limitation of this simplicity makes it difficult to add new functions to the network core itself. This is exacerbated by the conservative tendency of commercial entities to "leave well-enough alone", leading to the current situation often referred to as the ossification of the Internet. For decades, there has been practically no new functionality that has been added to the core Internet on a large scale. This thesis explores the possibility of enabling in-network services towards the goal of overcoming the ossification of the Internet. Our ultimate goal is to provide a common run-time environment supported by all Internet nodes and a wide-area deployment mechanism, so that network services can be freely installed, removed, and migrated among Internet nodes of all kinds–from a backbone router to a set-top box at home. In that vision of a future Internet, there is little difference between servers and routers for the purpose of running network services. Services can run anywh