We propose a new internetworking architecture that represents a significant departure from current philosophy and practice. Building upon our experience with the design and prototyping of the Just-in-Time protocol suite, we outline a networking framework consisting of

1. Building blocks of fine-grain functionality
2. Explicit support for combining elemental blocks to accomplish highly configurable complex communication tasks
3. Control elements to facilitate (what is currently referred to as) cross-layer interactions.

We take a holistic view of network design, allowing applications to work synergistically with the network architecture and physical layers so as to meet the application's needs within resource availability constraints. The proposed architecture is flexible and extensible so as to foster innovation and accommodate change, it supports a unified Internet, it allows for the integration of security and management features at any point in (what is now referred to as) the networking stack, and it is positioned to take advantage of hardware-based performance-enhancing techniques.

Specific goals of the proposed research include the following:

1. We will devote a significant amount of effort to flesh out the details and refine the various elements of the architecture;
2. We will lay the theoretical foundations for facilitating a synergy among the applications, network architecture, and physical layers so as to select the appropriate functional building blocks and tune their behavior for a specific communication task
3. We will build proof-of-concept prototypes to demonstrate and evaluate specific elements of the architecture
4. We will incorporate the results of our research into our educational activities so as to engage a wide range of students and create opportunities for underrepresented groups in computer science.

Our ambitious research agenda has the potential to open new directions in the design of self-configurable and self-optimizing network architectures. The flexible and efficient design we propose has the ability to cater to the requirements of a wide range of heterogeneous applications, both existing and ones yet to emerge, by selecting from a menu of optimized services to build the network stack on-demand and customize its behavior for the communication task at hand. The proposed framework of automatically assembled fine-grain functional building blocks with its emphasis on explicit control interfaces, can be the centerpiece of a future Internet architecture which interacts harmoniously with applications and the physical layer to optimize user experience.