Future Internet Exchange Point (FIXP): Enabling Future Internet Architectures Interconnection

The Internet is a crucial infrastructure for the digital era of a fully connected society. However, the design of the Internet’s protocols occurred several decades ago based on entirely different assumptions, and this motivated several initiatives to propose the replacement of the TCP/IP protocol stack. Some of these efforts are known as Future Internet Architectures (FIAs), and some examples of these projects are RINA, MobilityFirst, XIA, CCNx, ETArch, and NovaGenesis. Each architecture has its particular purpose and its own set of design goals, but all of them try to advance several aspects related to the current Internet architecture. Considering that these network architectures use disconnected assumptions, their integration would be impossible. Nevertheless, a possible approach would be the coexistence of a set of FIAs or even interconnection with the current Internet architecture. This work presents the architecture of the Future Internet Exchange Point (FIXP), a software-defined infrastructure that will contribute to the deployment of future network architectures by leveraging the concept of current Internet Exchange Points (IXPs). Using a P4 switch for the interconnections of the TCP/IP and ETArch architectures, we implemented a FIXP proof of concept. Obtained results are promising for incoming data packets processing times, rule adding, and flow completion times.