PacketCloud: an open platform for elastic in-network services.

The Internet was designed with the end-to-end principle where the network layer provided merely the best-effort forwarding service. This design makes it challenging to add new services to the network layer. However, as the Internet connectivity becomes a commodity, users and applications increasingly demand new in-network services. This paper proposes PacketCloud, a cloudlet-based open platform to host elastic in-network services. PacketCloud can help both Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and emerging application/content providers deploy their services to strategic network locations. We have implemented a proof-of-concept prototype of PacketCloud based on the MobilityFirst architecture. PacketCloud introduces a small additional delay, and can scale well to handle high-throughput data traffic.