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Princeton's system is what Assistant Professor of Computer Science calls a Service Access Layer that sits between the IP Network Layer (Layer 3) and Transport Layer (Layer 4), where it can work with unmodified network devices. Serval's purpose is to make Web services such as Gmail and Facebook more easily accessible, regardless of where an end user is, via a services naming scheme that augments what the researchers call an IP address set-up "designed for communication between fixed hosts with topology-dependent addresses." Data center operators could benefit by running Web servers in virtual machines across the cloud and rely less on traditional load balancers.

Freedman, who heads the Serval team and is a recent recipient of a , says Serval initially is in the form of a loadable kernel module for Linux and systems, though can also work with Mac and Unix-based systems, and translators have been implemented that could keep machines in the loop, too. Hardware blades could be fashioned from the technology down the road as well, he says.

"One can think of this as an overlay, but really, it means there is some software running on machines that act as service routers (much like DNS resolvers/nameservers or DHCP servers," Freedman says. "These are only 'on-path' for the first packet of each flow, unlike today's load balancers, which must be on-path for each packet."