As the Internet evolves into a global communication infrastructure, there is a growing need to support powerful and flexible services such as traffic management and quality of service. Over the past decade, two classes of solutions have emerged: those maintaining the stateless property of the original IP architecture (e.g., Differentiated Services), and those requiring a new stateful architecture in which routers have to maintain and manage per-flow or per-connection state (e.g., Integrated Services). While stateless solutions are more scalable and robust, stateful solutions can provide services with higher flexibility, utilization, and assurance levels.

In this talk, Stoica will present a novel technique and network architecture that bridge this long-standing gap between stateless and stateful solutions. The key idea behind this technique, called Dynamic Packet State (DPS), is that, instead of having routers maintain per-flow state, packets carry this state. Based on DPS, Stoica has developed a network architecture called Stateless Core (SCORE) in which core routers do not maintain any per-flow state. Yet, by using DPS, a SCORE network can provide services which are as powerful and flexible as the services provided by stateful networks.