  The current strong divide between applications and the network control plane
is desirable for many reasons; but a downside is that the network is kept in
the dark regarding the ultimate purposes and intentions of applications and, as
a result, is unable to optimize for these. An alternative approach, explored in
this paper, is for applications to declare to the network their abstract
intents and assumptions; e.g. "this is a Tweet", or "this application will run
within a local domain". Such an enriched semantic has the potential to enable
the network better to fulfill application intent, while also helping optimize
network resource usage across applications. We refer to this approach as
'intent driven networking' (IDN), and we sketch an incrementally-deployable
design to serve as a stepping stone towards a practical realization of the IDN
concept within today's Internet.
