There is an increasing consensus, supported by growing empirical evidence of failure, that it is time to re-architect the Internet. There are many candidates for that: “software defined networking” (SDN); virtualisation; distributed networks; whole new ways of routing such as content centric networking; and even AI and machine learning. The hope is to produce a new, autonomous, architecture that enables new applications in industrial automation and enhanced experience into the foreseeable future. On earth and as we return to space. This paper describes a fresh approach that combines all these solutions into one Unified Content Distribution Network (UCDN) that does exactly that.
