Autonomous-System Interfaces

The current Internet is characterized by a growing tension between the "core" (the Internet service providers) and the "edge" (the operators of edge networks and distributed applications). Much of this tension concerns path visibility and control -- where traffic goes (route control), where traffic comes from (path identification and filtering), and what happened in between (monitoring and accountability). We argue that this conflict harms both the core and the edge and that, to resolve it, we have to expose the Autonomous System (AS) as a first-class Internet object. This would map the functional structure of the Internet (the granularity at which edge systems can observe and control their traffic) to the organizational one (a graph of ASes). We argue that providing a well-defined interface between core and edge ASes offers significant benefits to both of them.