Daily, billions of individuals across the world wake up, boot up, and sign on to the Internet. What started as a simple exchange of test data among computers in a UCLA lab on September 2, 1969, has morphed into one of the world’s most significant technical achievements.
Despite this unprecedented success, research continues on ways to improve the Internet’s performance and capabilities. One area of focus is on technologies that could someday replace the TCP/IP protocol stack, something that has triggered a great deal of discussion and debate among the network’s most prominent developers, including Vint Cerf.
Whether or not TCP/IP is headed to the scrapheap is unclear, but according to Darleen Fischer, program director for networking technology and systems at the National Science Foundation (NSF) , which awards about $40 million per year toward Internet research, work on merely incremental Internet improvements invites stagnation.
New thinking is needed. TCP/IP, which divided communication tasks into distinct sectors, such as link, network, and application layers, is being rescrutinized. Its approach made sense 40 years ago, but the lines dividing applications, network protocols, and communications links have blurred through the years. Recently, the NSF has challenged researchers to focus on a clean-slate approach and develop networking technologies not bound by TCP/IP’s limitations.
One such attempt to develop a next-generation protocol stack is the Global Environment for Network Innovations (GENI). This project has lured computer scientists who are trying to develop a protocol stack that is not as rigid as TCP/IP and that supports cross-layer communications, so information can more easily flow from a network connection to an application. The group also plans to design a new control-and-measurement framework so ISPs and enterprises can manage their Web protocol stacks more effectively.
The NSF chose BBN Technologies (recently merged with Raytheon Co.), to oversee the project. Many of the GENI researchers also hail from organizations that belong to the Internet2 project, which has contributed network capacity to GENI.
The first prototype GENI core network nodes have been installed within two Internet2 backbone sites and have begun to be tested. The nodes were created by the ProtoGENI team at the University of Utah, led by Rob Ricci, and the Internet Scale Overlay Hosting team at Washington University in St. Louis, led by Jon Turner and aided by Chris Tracy of the Mid-Atlantic Crossroads (MAX) consortium, a group established by Georgetown University, George Washington University, the University of Maryland, and Virginia Tech to provide research and production testing services in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.
With the network nodes in place, various experimental networking projects can run tests based on the GENI work. One of these projects is PlanetLab, a consortium for technology development that is managed by Princeton University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Washington, with support from the NSF, Intel Corp. (Nasdaq: INTC), and the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
One of PlanetLab's main purposes is to serve as a test bed for new networking protocols and GENI network designs. More than 600 projects are underway, and participants are examining a variety of what PlanetLabs staffers call “planetary-scale” services, including massively scalable file sharing and network-embedded storage; content distribution networks; routing and multicast overlays; QoS overlays; scalable object location; scalable event propagation; anomaly detection mechanisms; and network measurement tools.
Even if this work never results in wholesale replacement of ISP networks, it's sure to boost the development of at least a few future improvements to the Internet.
— Paul Korzeniowski is a freelance writer who has been dissecting technology and business issues for two decades.
Okay, that makes sense. I am sure that where Internet services are involved, ISPs and their lead customers will be able to direct their suppliers. When it comes to some aspects of data center protocols and products, I think it's a different story.
Equipment suppliers have to meet the needs of their customers, especially the large ones, and nobody is larger than the mega-ISPs (Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, TWC). So the suppliers will have to provide what the ISPs want, and the enterprises reap the benefit.
Good point, Richard. I wonder, though, just how much influence enterprise customers can impose on their suppliers. Sometimes demands go unmet -- ask any IT manager. I'm not so sure that the big vendors aren't interested in bending the market to their own agendas and ensuring that customers follow.
I think things have changed since CMIP, Mary. Corporations are certainly slow to change and risk-averse, but consumers drive the Internet. If somebody comes up with a compelling application that needs a different protocol, consumers will drive the necessary upgrades.
We can enable that process by encouraging frank and honest discussion of the shortcomings of the current Internet architecture.
Just the fact that all these protocols were designed in a world of 300 baud modems...sheesh! However, "standards" are very sticky things. Look how long it took to dislodge 525 line NSTC tv signals! And AM radio is still here!
At the same time, I think with all the streaming movies and such, there has to be a better way...I mean, does it make sense to send the same exact sequence of packets once per viewer just because they choose to watch the movie different times?
The standards that interest me now are some of the Comet/Ajax/HTML5.
STOMP is a beaut, for example. So simple, yet so open to interpretation:
I think everyone realizes that a TCP/IP has done a fabulous job and works well now. Also a replacement will not happen overnight and whatever the next generation protocol may be, there will have to be a migration path from TCP/IP to it. But TCP/IP is not perfect. If we limit our research to only finding ways to improve it, then we will not have the opportunity to look at networking in new ways, some of which may be better than the established ways. So, I think we should try to designing other, more modern protocol stacks. Perhaps, some of the development work will lead to TCP/IP enhancements, maybe it will lead to a replacement, or maybe it will lead nowhere. But to me, it seem like such work needs to be undertaken.
I'd like to be a bit more open-minded about replacing TCP/IP, but the politics that drove out CMIP as a mainstream protocol demonstrated that unless something is implementable by businesses in a short-term, economical fashion, at best it's an anomaly and at worst it's little more than an expensive science project.
I definitely get the importance of looking closely at the future of scaleable networks, for the Web itself and the enterprise. I'm just not sure it's advisable right now to spend millions reinventing a wheel that may wind up being used only on academic networks.
In a way, I think science can be a victim of its own genius. A brilliant theoretical concept really needs the support of the real world -- and by that I mean key enterprises and their suppliers -- to become established. With scant resources available all around, it's time to focus on getting great concepts into production instead of the lab.
I love the idea of exploring, imagining a better way as much as the next guy...
I only hinted that this concept seems to be pushing too much, too soon.
By 2050-60 say, this OSI-based model might make more sense to get seriously working on -- right now though I think IPv6 is the way to go and will improve things vastly despite being another one of those "incremental" changes you and Richard seem to have disdain for...
Sorry, government and academia have the luxury of playing with the "Tax-payers" funds -- but Businesses do not.
Any development that isn't done incrementally as it pertains to the network infrastructure will be met with harsh and negative judgement from the business community at large -- with the exception of those that have a huge stake monetarily in the changes and would already be partnering with the govt/academic communities to solicit these changes...
Unfortunately, wishful thinking doesn't move information around networks. We've been patching and enhancing the same basic set of protocols for 30 years in the case of TCP/IP and 20 years in the case of BGP, and at some point the changes in traffic load and link speed inevitably catch up with the design constraints that were operative at the time these things were born. You can't just say "gee, let's keep on patching and fixing" forever.
The OSI effort was supposed to replace TCP/IP, which was understood to be an experimental protocol suite with many known limitations, with a production-grade replacement back in the 1980s. The process got stuck in politics, so the replacement that was needed then didn't happen at the edge, although OSI protocols are used in the optical core today. The longer we put this off, the more painful and expensive it becomes.
As noted in my own blog on this subject it is not for nothing that the latest conference to address this is entitled "Big Ideas to Substantially Change the Internet". It takes imagination to predict the future here. That requirement does not make the predictions wrong, or even impractical in the long run.
If you want to get in the mood for this kind of thinking have a look at some sites you find if you search on "capture the imagination"
It may not change your mind or get you to support what Paul and I are writing about here, but it will at least overcome some of the resistance and get you thinking in depth about some of the possibilities, rather than just quickly rejecting them.
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One of the Internet’s most venerable firms has opted for a buyout: BBN Technologies , which played an important role in development of Arpanet, the precursor to today’s Internet, has been gobbled up by Raytheon Co. , so its future is now up in the air.
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Just when it looked as if everyone was agreeing on net neutrality rules, the DC Court of Appeals has said the FCC has no authority to enforce them. We're now in for a period of regulatory chaos where everyone will have to try hard to follow, and influence, the issue.
The iPhone has created a new form of the 80/20 rule, according to AT&T, which claims only 3% of iPhone users generate 40% of wireless traffic. But is that really a justification for usage caps and pricing tiers? What did AT&T think was going to happen with the iPhone pricing plan, and are they shoveling something else at us now that we're hooked?
Comparing Internet services is tough because service providers price and market their services based on a best-case scenario connection that most consumers will never enjoy.
In theory it’s now possible to build a monitoring network that can listen to every conversation on the Internet simultaneously. In practice, there aren’t enough people on the planet to make sense of the data. But that’s about to change.
The state of the art in network monitoring has advanced to the point that there are devices available that tap into Internet communications and listen in to the traffic via ultra-high-speed packet capture at full 10-Gbit/s line rate – which was inconceivable even a few years ago. What does this mean for Internet users?
The government secrets of UFOs are hidden in Area 51, so where are the secrets of net neutrality hidden, Area 52? Nope, they're hidden in Paragraph 148 – and they're a lot more substantive than UFOs!
There's a public-policy war on copyright that nobody is winning, and inconsistencies in viewpoint and interpretation seem to be multiplying. We need to step back and think our policies over again, or we risk having a strategy that fails everyone.
Ultraviolet is an industry-wide attempt to standardize video content delivery across multiple platforms. Apart from the fact that it’s based in the cloud, relies on the DRM system, and isn’t backed by Apple… it sounds great!
The FCC's Sixth Broadband Report has a hidden secret. But here’s a hint: The regulatory body plans to regulate broadband as a telecommunications service.
Once defined by epic journeys, planning, and maps, the phrase "on the road" takes on new meaning in a digital age, where we can make all our decisions using our connected devices en route.
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