An Architecture For Edge Networking Services

The layered Internet architecture, while far from perfect, has provided a global and neutral platform for the development of a wide range of applications. However, this core architecture has been increasingly augmented with additional in-network functionality that improves the performance, security, and privacy of these applications. These additional in-network functions, which are typically implemented at the network edge, are consistent with the layering of the Internet architecture but deviate from two of the core tenets of the Internet: interconnection and end-to-end simplicity. In this paper, we propose an architecture for these edge networking services called the InterEdge that applies these two Internet tenets in a manner appropriate to edge services while not requiring changes to the underlying Internet architecture or infrastructure.