A New Approach to a Service Oriented Internet Protocol

Previous work on service oriented networking has mainly focused on the requirements of network operators and other service providers. This document proposes a new, backwards-compatible, approach to the topic that is directly aimed at end users and their requirements, but also has significant benefits for operators. It describes a proposed new mechanism for packet forwarding in edge networks, where the service required rather than an IP address acts as the vector for routing packets. Deeper in the network, the user's traffic is dispatched to specific services using conventional mechanisms.