A unifying infrastructure for Internet services

Effective service delivery capabilities are critical to the transformation of the Internet into a viable commercial infrastructure. At the same time, there are several design limitations that prevent this. In this paper, we propose a novel service overlay architecture that serves as a flexible, unifying platform for delivering services over the Internet. We introduce a new addressing scheme and an associated service layer, which enables service-oriented routing and forwarding over the underlying IP network domain. We also describe the functionality of the network elements that are introduced by our architecture, namely service gateway (SG) and service point-of-presence (SPOP). We also present examples to demonstrate the efficacy of our architecture.