This paper presents a new architecture of routing and naming so that the design of the Internet makes incorporating middleboxes easier. The authors argue that although middleboxes violates two of the tenets, the reason is that original Internet design is not flexible enough.
The new design uses the notion of EID to serve as global unique identifier, and uses method such as delegation to hop from one EID to another EID. This is how they enable middleboxes not on the physical path. It depends on DHT for naming lookup, translating EIDs to IP addresses or other EIDs.
It wasn't particularly clear to me that the problem with NAT and middleboxes are very serious. I think as ugly as middleboxes and NATs are, they are working fairly well. Everyone is buying them and manufacturs are coming up with various configuration tools to make sure they are set up correctly. This architecture has a clean design to it, but at what cost? Having an entire routing architecture depedant on a dynamic system like DHT just sounds like a bad idea. Particularly because the DHT is on the critical path of every flow until it is cached. The author recognizes the latency of DHT look up as a problem and throws out the caching as a general solution, but I think it is more difficult than that. Also the distributed nature of DHT makes it hard to find problems should one of the node respond slowly or fail.
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I have to agree with you. I never quite understood why the purists have had such a negative view of middleboxes. Yes, they cause problems for identifying endpoints, which has issues for routing and for some applications, but all of these have been solved in a more or less, if not architecturally pure, fashion. The fact that they work, and are widely used, and used effectively, indicates something about the relevancy of purity vs. effectiveness.
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