Blossom: A Decentralized Approach to Overcoming Systemic Internet Fragmentation

Abstract

The Internet is systemically fragmented. We consider the causes of fragmentation, including both technical concerns, such as middleboxes and routing failure, as well as political concerns, such as incomplete peering and the structure of Internet governance. While fragmentation may be desirable in certain circumstances and for various reasons, it can also be problematic, violating central Internet design principles and rendering routine tasks difficult. We motivate the need for a system designed to facilitate connectivity throughout the Internet, providing the benefits of locality, universal access, and distributed management, while interoperating with the existing infrastructure. Finally, we describe our prototype implementation that enables overcoming fragmentation in our network testbed.