Locator/Identifier Split Networking: A Promising Future Internet Architecture

The Internet has achieved unprecedented success in human history. However, its original design has encountered many challenges in the past decades due to the significant changes of context and requirements. As a result, the design of future networks has received great attention from both academia and industry, and numerous novel architectures have sprung up in recent years. Among them, the locator/identifier (Loc/ID) split networking is widely discussed for its decoupling of the overloaded IP address semantics, which satisfies several urgent needs of the current Internet such as mobility, multi-homing, routing scalability, security, and heterogeneous network convergence. Hence, in this paper, we focus on Loc/ID split network architectures, and provide a related comprehensive survey on their principles, mechanisms, and characteristics. First, we illustrate the major serious problems of the Internet caused by the overloading of IP address semantics. Second, we classify the existing Loc/ID split network architectures based on their properties, abstract the general principle and framework for each classification, and demonstrate related representative architectures in detail. Finally, we summarize the fundamental features of the Loc/ID split networking, compare corresponding investigated architectures, and discuss several open issues and opportunities.