Hierarchical National Addressing and Identity Architecture: Policy-Driven Routing Beyond IPv4/IPv6
Abstract
This study proposes the Hierarchical National Addressing and Identity Architecture (HNAIA) to address management and policy limitations arising from network addresses merely representing topological locations in critical infrastructure networks. HNAIA is designed not as a novel Internet Protocol version replacing IPv4 or IPv6, but as a contextual identity and policy abstraction operating on top of the existing IP locator layer. The architecture unifies a namespace composed of hierarchical components— country/sovereign domain, sector, region, administrative sub-region, institution-service class, and endpoint—with a distributed resolver and policy engine that maps this namespace to IP locators. The claim of novelty of this study does not lie in proposing identity-locator separation for the first time; this separation has been thoroughly examined in prior literature such as the Host Identity Protocol (HIP), service-centric networks, and information-centric networks (Moskowitz & Komu, 2021; Moskowitz et al., 2015; Zhang et al., 2014; Caesar, 2007). Instead, HNAIA provides an architecture that can be incrementally deployed onto current IPv4/IPv6 infrastructure by defining the institutional/regional context as an explicit namespace and coupling this context with policy-driven access control and locator selection. In this work, the HNAIA namespace syntax, canonical binary encoding, identity-locator mapping model, resolver pipeline, policy-driven path selection, scalability model, threat model, fault recovery scenarios, and a deployment model for health informatics are formally specified. Beyond presenting a conceptual proposal, this study includes formal definitions, a canonical binary encoding scheme, a resolution and policy model, along with empirical verification results obtained from a Mininet/OpenFlow experimental environment. The presentation format integrates both the theoretical architectural framework and empirical findings, enabling the proposed approach to be evaluated as a testable and comparable research hypothesis.