The emergence of slice-based computing model has raised high demand on replacing the interface- based addressing model with user-oriented addressing (UOA) paradigm. Assigning IP addresses to users instead of interfaces or hosts help us to realize high-granularity controls on port resource utilization, identity authentication, and quality of service.

In this paper, we propose a reference prototype implementation of Linux operating system, which enables an administrator to associate each user with a certain IPv6 (or IPv4) address. Processes of a certain user can only use the user's associated addresses, to send or receive packets. The system prototype has been implemented via three major works. First, we add a data structure in the operating system to record the user-address association. Second, the socket library in the kernel is modified in order that address usage permission is checked when process invokes connect, bind or sendmsg operations. Finally, a minimal set of administration tools has been developed so that the host administrator can configure the user-address association according to necessity. Basic experiments have shown that the prototype is working well without significant performance degradation.

We also would like to briefly discuss some controversy about user-oriented addressing model in this paper, but only the implementation level, but also in the context of architectural design.

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