A key requirement in packet switching networks is
an efficient way to access information stored within the routers.
The most obvious example is the routing table and its associated
forwarding information, accessed at least once for each packet
traversing the router, but advanced protocols may require to
store and access flow state information too, adding scalability
problems as well.
This paper introduces an innovative, highly efficient way to
exploit the cooperation between end nodes and intermediate
systems based on Distributed Linked Data Structures. When
integrated in network protocols (for example as a new IP option
field), they provide the router the memory addresses needed to
access the required information without the need of searching.
This leads to constant cost procedures, increasing performance
and overcoming scalability problems.
DLDS may support several different applications, some of
which are presented in the paper; prototypal implementations
have been developed to validate the technique and to measure
performance.
