Perspective Access Networks

Abstract

Perspective Access Networks provide an infrastructure from which users can specify the location from which they wish to view the Internet. The ability to specify location has become necessary as the Internet has become increasingly inconsistent. An increasing preponderance of middleboxes, location-dependent services, and large-scale content filtering have contributed to this situation. Our work offers the following contributions. First, we propose an infrastructure that routes traffic to a location from which a given resource can be viewed, taking instructions from user-specified attributes describing the desired location. Second, we analyze the tradeoff between the expressivity of user requests and the finite resources available within the network for propagating metadata about available perspectives. Third, we stipulate a set of real scenarios that fall within the limits of what can reasonably be handled by a system appropriately tuned to manage the tradeoff, and we argue that the specific algorithm we propose can handle the scenarios effectively.