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DARPA Aims to Redo the Internet Protocol
Xaleth Nuada writes "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) is looking to redo the entire Internet Protocol. With the DoD increasingly adopting network-centric warfare the shortcomings in the current IP have become resoundingly clear. Everything works fine for static hardwired networks. But not for dynamic wireless ones. The benefits for your average geek? How about REAL wireless networking? Easier network set-up? Increased wireless security protocol? Increased reliability in sending information?" Don't forget massive incompatibility and upgrade hassles. :)
DARPA takes aim at IT sacred cows
By Joab Jackson
GCN Staff
ANAHEIM, Calif.--Now that the Defense Department is embracing network-driven warfare, it is taking a hard look at radically improving, or discarding altogether, some fundamental computer and network architectures.
Flaws in the basic building blocks of networking and computer science are hampering reliability, limiting flexibility and creating security vulnerabilities, program managers said this week at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's DARPATech conference.
Among the IT holy grails that DARPA wants to see revamped are the Internet Protocol, the seven-layer Open Systems Interconnection model--which defines how devices communicate on today's networks--and the von Neumann architecture, the basic design style underpinning almost all computers built today.
Many military commanders have been slow to adapt IT for critical tasks because they sense the equipment is unreliable, said Col. Tim Gibson. He is a program manager for DARPA's Advanced Technology Office, which is leading efforts to radically redefine computer architecture.
"You go to Wal-Mart and buy a telephone for less than $10 and you expect it to work," Gibson said. Yet people usually do not expect the same of their computers. "We don't expect computers to work, we expect them to have a problem."
"If a commander expects a system to have a problem, then how could they rely upon it?" Gibson said.
Gibson cast some of the blame on the packet-based nature of Internet Protocol, which was not designed for foolproof delivery of messages. The protocol cannot guarantee delivery of e-mail, for instance.
"The packet network paradigm probably needs to change," Gibson said. "I'm not advocating throwing out the Internet Protocol completely, but we must absolutely have some mechanism for assigning network capabilities to different users and that capability has to scale to large numbers of devices automatically. The commander wants to be able to send a message and have it delivered, completely, accurately and on time."
Another limitation with the IP approach is the inability to dynamically build networks. The military wants to quickly set up ad hoc networks.
"Static networks are no good for tomorrow's battlefield, because everything will move around all the time," Gibson said. "What we need is dynamic scalability. Today's networks are stationary and have a static infrastructure that provides service to static end-nodes. Moving the node outside its standard service area requires reconfiguring something. Moving infrastructure always means reconfiguring something."
As a result, DARPA wants to fund development of new protocols or enhancements to the existing IP that will allow nodes, such as computers, to automatically sign on to networks in their vicinity.
Another aspects of the networking that DARPA wants to revise is the seven-layer OSI stack, long held as the basic foundation for building network protocols.
The OSI model was not designed for wireless communications devices, said Reggie Brothers, a DARPA program manager.
"The OSI model served us pretty well for the stable, predictable world of wireline communications," Brothers said. "Mobile networks are nothing like that. They are unpredictable and highly variable. We need to think of different layers of the stack to relate to one another directly, like a mesh, instead of one level up to the next."
The increased complexity of the network stack would let nodes enter a network quickly and without human intervention, Brothers said.
The von Neumann architecture will also come under scrutiny from DARPA.
"It is time to ask the harder questions about the ways of computer architecture we've been using for the past 30 years. Is it time to scrap the von Neumann architecture?" asked Anup Gosh, program officer for the Advanced Technology Office.
This architecture, which defines the basic essential parts of
Gibson cast some of the blame on the packet-based nature of Internet Protocol, which was not designed for foolproof delivery of messages. The protocol cannot guarantee delivery of e-mail, for instance.
Who is this guy really? Thats not what IP is for - foolproof delivery of packets is handled by connection-orientated protocols like TCP. Sure, it might not get the *right away*, but the flexibility of packet based routing is something that has made networks as reliable as they are today (despite the huge amount of moaning that people do about them).
Mind you, as people have pointed out before, IPv6 has been waiting in the wings for a while now, and a military request for change might be the kind action needed to kick other people into gear.
It's time to go back to basic networking class...
The OSI Networking Model is a 7-layer system that can be used interchangably, layers run on top of each other... for example, HTTP specifies that it use TCP which wraps around IP over any physical protocol. It doesn't care if you're using WiFi or a hardwired connection.
So, what this is saying is that IPv4, and even IPv6 are protocols that were written with wires and not wireless in mind. There are tweaks that can be made to the next version of the Internet Protocol and maybe even TCP and UDP to make them work better when on wireless without giving too much up when used on a wired physical link. This is the process of figuring out what changes should be made for next time.