i3

This paper presents an Internet overlay that delivery packets in a rendezvous fashion. I think it is a very elegant solution to the problem of mobility and multicast, because ultimately the data is what the receiver is after. Its location is only a mean for it to obtain that piece of data. This sort of reminds me of web mail but with a much tighter latency constraint. We get mobility of webmail by having a pull model instead of a push model, however it is certainly too slow if we do the samething at packet level. So i3 essentially uses webmail model as control plane and establish a fast data path for more packets.

I like the basic idea behind i3. I am not certain the implementation can be widely deployed due to the problem in scaling up. They are already seeing some performance overhead with using DHT as trigger maintenance method. Nevertheless this model of communication opens up a wide range of possiblities to improve and hopefully overtime there will be innovation in the details of implementation of such system that overhead and scaling problem can be resolved.