ABSTRACT
In today’s world, the role of the Internet cannot be ignored. This spans across the communication between any two systems in the form of bits over different kinds of networks across the world both wired and wireless in nature. The Internet is considered to run over a legacy IP Protocol. A brief recap as to what this constitutes is: The Internet follows a basic four-layer architecture. The layers are the application layer (consisting of both the presentation and the session layer if one is studying the seven-layer Open System Interconnect (OSI) model), the transport layer, the Network or Internet layer, and the Network Interface layer (jointly represents the data link layer and physical layer of OSI model). The responsibilities of each layer are: The application layer hosts the user applications. These applications may use protocols like ftp, http, etc. for exchanging data with the remote host. This layer uses various services of Transport layer for reliable and efficient data transport. The two most popularly used protocols at the Transport layer are Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP). The former is known for its reliability (provides end-to-end error recovery using retransmission) while the later provides smaller delays at the cost of reliability. This layer logically connects the applications at two ends. The next layer in the Internet layer architecture is the Network/Internet layer. The primary function of this 27layer is to route the traffic through the network. The layer after this is the Network Interface Layer. This layer does the low-level functionalities of Medium Access Control at the link level, error recovery of any lost frames, and the actual physical transmission of the data on the underlying link. Unlike above layers, the scope of this layer is only till next hop and provides hop by hop control over the medium and frame error if any. It is worthwhile to note that users’ requirements in today’s world have changed significantly from those of the time when the current Internet architecture was conceived. Though by far the current architecture is able to satisfy all our requirements, it won’t be long until it will be not able to meet the exponentially growing demands of modern users. The number of systems around the world is increasing greatly but apart from this, the number of other devices that connect to the Internet is also increasing greatly. Laptops, mobile devices, cloud-based services, IoT, etc. are all concepts that have increased the number of devices connecting to the Internet significantly. According to surveys, there are going to be more than 20 billion IoT devices and smartphones by 2020. This huge number cannot be handled by the current legacy architecture for a variety of reasons like namespace, traffic load, effective traffic management, delays, and a variety of other reasons.
