Evolving the Network Layer of the Internet — 3/31
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Changing the Internet architecture is notoriously difficult. A key reason for this difficulty is that today’s Internet infrastructure is mainly built on specialized hardware. This has long been considered a prerequisite for achieving the packet-processing speeds needed in the Internet core, but makes changing the functionality of the network hard, if not impossible.
via Evolving the Network Layer of the Internet — Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

