Though appropriate for core Internet infrastructure, the Internet Protocol is
unsuited to routing within and between emerging ad-hoc edge networks due to
its dependence on hierarchical, administratively assigned addresses. Existing
ad-hoc routing protocols address the management problem but do not scale to
Internet-wide networks. The promise of ubiquitous network computing cannot be
fulfilled until we develop an Unmanaged Internet Protocol (UIP), a scalable
routing protocol that manages itself automatically. UIP must route within and
between constantly changing edge networks potentially containing millions or
billions of nodes, and must still function within edge networks disconnected
from the main Internet, all without imposing the administrative burden of
hierarchical address assignment. Such a protocol appears challenging but
feasible. We propose an architecture based on self-certifying, cryptographic
node identities and a routing algorithm adapted from distributed hash tables.