The goal of the working group is to design, specify, implement and test a
flexible new routing and addressing architecture suitable for very large
scale internets.  The basic architecture for computation of routes will
be based on distribution of network topology maps, with source-specified
route selection, and unitary (i.e., not hop-by-hop) computation of routes.

The architecture will provide a single homogeneous framework for all
routing, including both inter-domain and intra-domain.  It will include a
new network component naming abstraction hierarchy, starting from network
attachment points, and based on actual connectivity, but taking into
consideration policy requirements.  These new names will be variable
length, with a variable number of levels of abstraction; they will not
appear in most packets, though.

Actual packet forwarding will be based both on retained non-critical
state in the switches (via flow setup for long-lived communications), and
both classical address-only, as well as source-route type instructions, in
individual packets (for datagram applications which send only one, or a very
few, packets).

Although the general design and algorithms will be usable in any
internetworking protocol family, the initial detailed protocol
specifications and implementation are currently planned for deployment
with IPv4, but support for another packet format may be substituted or
added, depending on the situation in the Internet in the future.
Interoperabilty with existing unmodified IPv4 hosts will be achieved by
re-interpreting the existing source and destination fields in IPv4
packets as endpoint identifiers.

A substantial effort to take into account support for mobility,
multicast and resource allocation will be made when designing the Nimrod
architecture; provided that so doing is neither impossible because of
incomplete work outside the scope of Nimrod, nor the cause of very
substantial delays in the first iteration of the protocol design.