"Intuitive Global Connectivity for Personal Mobile Devices"

Bryan Ford, MIT

...The Unmanaged Internet Architecture (UIA) is a suite of design principles and experimental protocols that provide robust, efficient global connectivity among mobile devices while relying for configuration only on simple, intuitive management concepts. UIA uses "personal names" rather than traditional global names as handles for accessing personal devices remotely. Users assign these personal names via an ad hoc device introduction process requiring no central allocation. Once assigned, personal names bind securely to the global identities of their target devices independent of network location. Each user manages one namespace, shared among all the user's devices and always available on each device. Users can also name other users to share resources with trusted acquaintances. Devices with naming relationships automatically arrange connectivity when possible, both in ad hoc networks and using global infrastructure when available. We built a prototype implementation of UIA that demonstrates the utility and feasibility of these design principles. The prototype includes an overlay routing layer that leverages the user's social network to provide robust connectivity in spite of network failures and asymmetries such as NATs, a new transport protocol implementing a novel stream abstraction that more effectively supports the highly parallelized and media-oriented applications demanded on mobile devices, and a flexible security framework based on proof-carrying authorization (PCA) that provides "plug-in" interoperability with existing secure naming and authentication systems.