Towards a Network-friendlier Midcom
While IP was designed around the notion that the network would be invisible to the applications that run on them, an increasingly complex service environment along with the compartmentalization of 'policy' into administrative domains has led to a proliferation of types of middleboxes for policy enforcement, and those middleboxes are interfering with applications. Applications now need to influ- ence the behavior of middleboxes, but violating network layering principles by establishing explicit communication channels from applications to network-layer middleboxes introduces a new set of problems related to topology and discovery as well as consequent problems that ripple out from those. This paper is an introductory examination of whether or not there is a better way.