Providing More Than ‘Just’ Reachability Through Semantic Networking

The Internet has been constantly evolving beyond its original purpose to ensure the reachability between endpoints wherever they may be located. The many technologies developed in Standard Developing Organizations (SDOs) and through proprietary solutions bear witness to this continuous evolution, often driven through specifying and implementing new communication protocols or design practises. Parts of those solutions may overload, amend, or extend packet header semantics at the risk of endangering interoperability of the solutions that make up the Internet system. This discussion paper advocates the Semantic Networking vision, explicitly exposing communication semantics as the essential abstraction for its runtime realization. We present an architecture for Semantic Networking and discuss key design considerations that may inform future research and development work, eventually leading to a new Internet architecture.