Who needs addresses?

The author describes a framework for virtualising network addresses, reasoning that virtualisation requires reversing the usual the network-first, resource-second addressing order. A hierarchical name space is constructed for representing the shared resources by a homogenised form of URLs, a logical end-to-end route is constructed by combining the bind and connect requests over this name space, and used instead of end-to-end addresses for setting up virtual paths. Direct interpretation of the homogenised URLs ensures logical routing performance comparable to IP routing, and the logical route provides geographical trimming of the search in the transaction to virtual paths. Resulting features include a simple, uniform API for both point-to-point and multipoint connectivity, host security by invisibility, etc., which can be availed by privately deploying the framework over the existing networks.