We read a lot of papers that want to change the way naming on the Internet works, Often the goal seems to be to allow users to connect just to another user, no matter where they are. I think it would be interesting to try some kind of mapping from unique identifiers of devices (MAC addresses, perhaps) to a user entity on the network, such that packets for that user are broadcast to all registered devices on the network. This may have been done (I'm still without Internet access as I write this), but it is something to think about. Registration would require a centralized or semi-centralized solution (super-peers) because flooding the network with requests just gets to be too much for most networks. Target devices could respond with either “don't talk to me, I'm not in use” or with the expected responses to a given packet.
The next question is whether this is more or less efficient than our current DNS setup. That will require research. I find, however, that with services like Google Voice, there does appear to be a demand for such a user location service (location on the network, at least – it might be nice to prevent system abuse by stalkers).
I really like this idea of a Google Voice for all Internet traffic needing to find me. This should be especially important now that we access the Internet from multiple devices during the day.
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