PSIRP
PSIRP (Publish-Subscribe Internetworking Routing Paradigm) is an EU-funded research project that aims at designing, implementing and evaluating an internetworking layer for the Future Internet, such layer being based on an information-centric publish-subscribe paradigm of communication. The project is funded within the 7th Framework Programme of the European Union. The project started in January 2008 and will end in June 2010.
The partners of the project are:
- TKK-HIIT
- RWTH
- BT
- LMF
- NSNF
- IPP-BAS
- AUEB-RC
Overview
The Problem
For almost 30 years, the Internet has been coping with ever increasing traffic and new applications, including voice and video, while retaining its original architecture, drafted almost 40 years ago. Despite its success, the Internet is suffering from several key design flaws, most notably an imbalance of powers in favour of the sender of information, who is overly trusted. The network accepts anything that the sender wants to send and will make a best effort to deliver it to the receiver. This has led to increasing problems with unsolicited traffic (e.g. spam e-mail) and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, forcing companies and users to conceal their e-mail addresses and place their systems behind firewalls.
The worst consequence is that the full range of possibilities offered by the Internet is not being exploited and trust in its proper operation has been lost.
A Solution
Experts all over the world are beginning to agree that a fundamental reform of the Internet’s paradigms and core technologies is needed to cope with the challenges of the new millennium. The publish/subscribe paradigm (pub/sub) has been proposed as a remedy to the problems facing the current Internet
In pub/sub networking, senders “publish” what they want to send and receivers “subscribe” to the publications that they want to receive. In principle, no one receives any material to which they have not explicitly expressed an interest by way of subscription. The result is a powerful yet flexible infrastructure with a high degree of resiliency.
One can observe that a large share of the Internet’s usage is already essentially pub/sub in nature:
- Dissemination of software updates
- Delivery of breaking news announcements
- General media broadcasting (e.g., audio/video)
- Periodic and aperiodic messaging
…and many more!
In addition, contemporary areas of research like sensor networks and context awareness rely on pub/sub communications to provide services to end users.
It seems promising to derive a new Internet architecture based on the pub/sub paradigm, leading to a redesign of all Internet communication layers. In such a new Internet, multicast and caching will be the norm and security and mobility will be designed into the architecture, rather than added as after-thoughts.
The PSIRP Mission
The PSIRP project will redesign the Internet architecture from the pub/sub point of view, taking nothing (not even IP) for granted. PSIRP’s work will focus on the intersection of security, routing, wireless access, architecture design, and network economics, in order to design and develop efficient and effective solutions. The new pub/sub-based internetworking architecture will restore the balance of network economics incentives between the sender and the receiver and is well suited to meet the challenges of future information-centric applications and use modes.
The PSIRP project’s main objectives are as follows:
- Design a new information-centric internetworking architecture based on the publish-subscribe paradigm
- Make “information” the centre of attention and remove the “location-identity split” that plagues current networks
- Implement innovative multicasting and caching features to optimize performance and efficiency
- Implement security functionality as a native core component of the architecture
- Implement and validate the new architecture under realistic operational scenarios
- Collaborate with key industry experts and promote their ideas in the wider community through publications, presentations, workshops, and involvement with other projects at the European and international levels
- Disseminate the results
Key Technical Issues
Among the key issues that PSIRP will have to address are
- Scalability: How scalable is the proposed solution, to be evaluated through proper quantitative methods.
- Security: Security cannot be treated as a separate entity but as an integral part of the design and implementation. Among the most difficult security challenges are protection against unsolicited traffic and denial of service (DoS). Security is to be evaluated by virtue of a Red Team that will attempt to “break” the design.
- Efficiency: Efficient distribution of massive amounts of information, including video, mandates the use of multicasting and caching. In the new architecture, multicast is not the exception but the norm.
- Socio-economic Impact: Designing an architecture also means enabling business prospects. Understanding the impact on future businesses and society as a whole as well as the larger economic impact is crucial for evaluating the viability of the proposed solution.
- Exploitation: The usefulness of any technical innovation is strictly limited by its ease of use. The Internet is a unique tool in this regard because it has an enormous user-base whose members fall under a broad spectrum of competencies. PSIRP solutions will be designed so as to provide powerful benefits to the entire range of Internet users.
Key Outcomes
The project will produce proof-of-concept implementations of the proposed solutions. The clean-slate implementation will consider the redesign of the Internet’s lower layers, while the overlay design will be built on top of IP as a potential migration option.
Some innovations may be patented. However, the results of the project will be, as much as possible, published as scientific papers, and the source code will be made available under a liberal license (such as BSD). Most of the PSIRP deliverables will be released to the public domain and can therefore be found on this website (i.e. Publications & Downloads) for everybody to read.
In the original spirit of the Internet (“rough consensus and working code”), the PSIRP project believes in good ideas implemented well.