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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. :)
Given the scale of the re-work proposals (replacing the Von-Nuemann architecture...), I'd be surprised if there wasn't some effort made to embed snooping and tracing into all packets transmitted. This *is* the DoD after all!
On the other hand, given how slowly IPv6 is making its way into the wider world, we probably don't have too much to worry about for the time being!
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
"Don't forget massive incompatibility and upgrade hassles."
I read that as:
"Don't forget about the sudden explosion of extended-temp jobs flooding the market as the Internet decides to change over..."
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Upgraded to IPv6. Sigh.
They'd best be careful, or this "Protocol 7" will inadvertently cause data from dead people to leak to the Internet...
Don't forget massive incompatibility and upgrade hassles. :)
Yeah man, but massive incompatability and upgrade hassles are what keep some of us employed! GO DARPA!
Excuse my speling.
Making The Bar Project
And when will this new Internet Protocol be rolled out...
shortly after IPv6 adoption?
I don't see Satan reaching for his winter parka just yet...
Easier activity tracing, easier monitoring, easing censorship of "bad" websites, easier disabling of internet access to undesirables.
A new Internet Protocol? Isn't that called IPv6? They put a lot more security features in that time; if they need more now, why didn't they get it right back then? And what should convince me that they will this time?
Now, off to RTFA.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
what does it mean by REAL Wireless networking? isn't 802.11 wireless? i'm confused...
DARPA did help lay the foundations for the Internet. They may be in a good position to bring positive innovation to the IP protocol. Just as long as enough of us /.ers can see through any hidden embedded packet sniffing credit card stealing email reading we're watching you protocols, we should be GREAT.
Im a former Marine myself, and I fondly remember what a nightmare it was just trying to get everyone to have the same crypto loads for existing voice communications hardware. Im really curious as to how they propose to keep the network secure. On the other hand, the possible benifits are huge. Distributed sensor networks in particular could be revolutionized by this.
"Hand me the bullet-shooty-thing and a box of little hurts" -Overheard on a USMC Rifle range
Perhaps they can include, as a side project, a revamp of some of the transport layer protocols. How about something to replace SMTP with a protocol designed to help lessen the wide-spread proliferation of Spam? Perhaps we should all just switch to Jabber and get rid of that whole email thing.
-- Stu
/. ID under 2,000. I feel old now.
Let's just all pray the military dosn't call this SKYNET.
Yay! Sounds like a great idea... get the government involved with solving all the technical problems.
Watch congress get involved! Watch how the project ends up championed by the "experts" at Microsoft (because they pay the dough and it's the only name the congressdrones know). Watch how the whole project ends up propritary and billg forces the government to pay $50 per node. Finally.. watch how the whole system ends up unreliable... so we end up with a system that is not free, expensive, and less reliable than before.
Keep the government out of the center of it... let them contribute to the community like everyone else and MAYBE we will get something that works that everyone can use without selling their soul.
Why don't you embrace your slashbotness instead of living in a dreamworld?
Yeah, heaven forbid we learn from our previous attempt and start fresh. We should aspire to do like Microsoft - maintain backward compatability above all other goals. Seems to work for them, right? It certainly makes things more secure...
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Well, one of the improvements IPv6 does is better support for ad-hoc networking. Are they saying we need something even better than what that?
Or are they just talking about IPv6? IPv6 is just that -- Internet Protocol version 6.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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
Can somebody try to tell these guys it's a little too late to put the genie back in the bottle. We can't change SMTP to stop spam and they want to change the whole TCP/IP thing. Good luck changing it in the next 30 years.
Stay tuned for new sig...
stop complaining- it'll work on the old IP systems via tunneling. Was that really so hard?
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Please, anything that's not encumbered by *anybody's* IP patents.
just like it has for IPv6.
People will only upgrade if it's absolutely painless or absolutely necessary, we should've learned this by now. I have friends that still use analog cell phones, just because it's easier not to switch.
-- atomly
DARPA invented the Internet Protocol before, and within a few decades the technology was widely deployed. Unfortunately, this time around, things won't be so easy.
Before, it was competing against a vacuum. Now, it's competing against ubiquitous IP. They may develop some cool stuff that works on a battlefield, but it will never get widespread usage, commoditization, and economy of scale that IP has. If they come up with new features that work great, somebody will find a way to get similar functionality built on top of good old IP.
IP isn't perfect, but it's good enough that there's no way to displace it, given its free nature and level of entrenchment=.
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.
Voice is data, video is data, they all run over IP and therefore can be considered data just like anything else.
What we don't have is security built into IP. IPSec is a good beginning, but its more of an afterthought. Not nearly as good as what they could do if security were an integrated part of the native IP protocol.
we must absolutely have some mechanism for assigning network capabilities to different users
Sorry, but the network capability of running a web server hasn't been assigned to you. You are blocked at the protocol layer.
Sounds like they don't want the Internet to be a network of ends anymore and control who can do what with the network. Nice experiment, this unrestricted free speech on the Internet, but we've decided we don't want you to have that. Be consumers, not producers.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Actually, the article is misleading. They're looking into ad-hoc networks (Gnutella is a good example of a simple ad-hoc network).
By definition, ad-hoc networks have a dynamic topology, and there has been lot's of research in that area in the last few years.
You could implement an ad-hoc network on top of other technologies (ip is not the best one, though).
Google for "adhoc networks" for more info.
Can I hear someone say IPv6?
Someone has not got enough to do....
IPv6 can go join IPv5 in the scrap heap now... bring on IPv7!
I'm not sure why the von Neumann architecture is such a security problem. I mean, the problem with computers not working isn't how they're built per se--turing machine, post machine, hell use cellular automata--it's that the mathematical theory says "it is impossible to write code (in general) that is guaranteed to be bug free". You could change the von Neumann archiecture, sure, but you could just as easily 'write an interpreter' (though with hardware) for the architecture. Either way, if you're writing code, you're going to have bugs.
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
M O/ BAA04-11/Grant.html
Federal and Non-Profit Funding Opportunities
http://www.fedgrants.gov/Applicants/DOD/DARPA/C
* Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) 04-11 Control Plane;
* Closing Date: 12 January 2005;
* Full Proposals for First Selection: 09 March 2004;
* POC: COL Tim Gibson, DARPA/ATO;
* Funding: $1-6 Million depending on application
* Program Objectives and Description: The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Advanced Technology Office (ATO) is soliciting proposals under this BAA for an Internet Control Plane protocol (hereafter called the Control Plane Program). The purpose of the Control Plane Program is improving end-to-end Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) wide-area network performance between the Continental United States (CONUS) operating base and forward deployed tactical units. The technology the program seeks to develop is the ability of individual hosts (end-points) to learn essential characteristics about the network path between themselves and their transmission partners.
* Eligibility: Unrestricted
They blame the packet nature of the network for lots of the problems but I see not other perposal given. How on earth do you build a network as large as the internet based on a non-packet archetecture? I am studing computer science right now at school and haveing completed two telcom courses and nobody has ever discused a conection-oriented technology that or even a conection-oriented concept that could cope with a network as large as the internet with as many hosts. Do any of you in slashdot land have a clue how they might even start to go about doing this? The other posibility is its a new twist on a conectionless network but how on earht is that possible with out some sort of packet archetecture to send over it, otherwise you'd have no way to change path with conditions and changeing conditions are UNAVOIDABLE on any network I have ever seen.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Yes, but the serious question is whether or not this so-called IPv7 will incorporate the Schumann resonance, tap into the collective unconsciousness of mankind, spontaneously create a little girl complete with family, and allow its creator to become some sort of god-like revenant.
Maybe I'm just watching too much anime...
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
All the US Govt haters. You know, they only DESIGNED the current internet for us. And they give out cool schwag like NSALinux and stuff.
;-) What would you trust? NE2k driver by some random polynesian company, or somebody who works on the computers at NASA?
And USgovt.. Yeah, they at NASA hired ol' Mr. Becker to make our lan drivers
Understand then decide.
TCP works poorly in a wireless environment because of the congestion control. When packets get lost, it assumes it's because of congestion and starts backing off, which slows down the connection even more. That's not always the case in wireless because packets can get lost due to interference and a number of other scenarios that do not exist for wired connections.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
It sounds to me more like some general had a brief introduction to computing theory, but didn't relate it to any real current technology.
The alternative to Von Neuman (Code and Data in the same memory) is to have code and data in seperate memory areas. This makes it very difficult to make computers where the code can change. Sure, there's no buffer overflows, but there's no security patches either. It might be fine for embedded devices, but I'll not have it on my desktop. The Page (or Segment) executable flag of more modern memory management units does the job fine, without all the hassle.
The OSI model is already not used anywhere except to compare proposed network models to; it's way too complex.
He talks about replacing packet switching so that messages are delivered on time & with certainty. Presumably he means some kind of virtual circuit switching, but he also talks a lot about constantly shifting ad-hoc networks. Circuit switchinfg & ad-hoc networks don't mix well. You have to know what the path is going to be before you can reserve it. It's probably better to just turn on the QoS and AH already implemented in IPv6.
Hmmmm good way to obsolete most older technology and force people into 'upgrading' into more controllable ( read DRM ) systems ..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
As some would put it, "tl;dr" ("too long; didn't read"), but from what I have read, I understand that the DARPA intends to update the entire Internet protocol, mainly because its structure compromises the security of the Army's confidential information mainly on the battlefield. If the Internet's current structure is what may be posing the Army Forces problems, why don't they just update the protocol and use this updated, more secure protocol on a private network of their own, instead of risking causing chaos on the "Interweb"?
"Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect" -- Linus Torval
They could mean ad hoc wireless networking. If they are looking for something that could help them communicate in the field, ad hoc wireless networking has great applications for them--basically, an ad hoc network does not have predefined hosts, access points, or what have you. Every node in the network communicates with the nodes around it (they could be a mixture of some wireless nodes and some wired nodes). There is no predefined leader, but the nodes themselves pick which nodes will act as temporary leaders to keep routing information, among other things. There are many different algorithms for determining these leaders, and the leaders can be changed if necessary due to nodes moving, entering an area, or leaving an area.
More information can be found here (Google's html version here.)
I am clearly fatter than you.
The article seems to have two different main points. Firstly that the entire networking model (7 layers) is inappropriate for "reliable" networks. Secondly they suggest that the entire model for building computers is wrong, and that somehow they need to use hardware to isloate programs.
The issues they address in the first point were issues which I felt were meant to be addressed by IP6, has/will it fail? I always understood IP6 as being designed to (optionally) have secure connections, qos and an ip address structure to allow for floating nodes. Would IP6 not stand up to delivering messages in network time for the entire US military structure?
The second issue seems simple to me, yes it will be much more reliable if you use a seperate computer for each task and allow them to communicate, but can you tolerate the lack of flexibility and is it even possible to do anything meaningful without adding lots of parts and weight (the more parts, the less reliable). I can imagine building a chip which actually contains 8 386s and 32M or ram split into 4M per 386, then have the disk controller map the device in an 8 way split so they can't touch each others data, a network chip could act as a switch to all the information, providing qos etc. buses to expansion could be mapped to cpus, but is it worth it or are you better off building two different but functionally identical systems so if one fails the other shouldn't? Also it's still one machine, as soon as you actually split it out into a meaningful number of machines weight, size and handling all become a problem. It would be lovely if you could sew tiny bluetooth enabled cpus w/mem into all the army gear and then they cluster together into a super cpu which reads the soldiers thumbprinted data device to figure out what to do, but would that actually require any sort of fundamental shift in how computers are made to achieve?
To me this article simply states that they haven't managed to build a good enough network yet, and want some cash to do it, and that they haven't managed to build a reliable os/app combination to deal with their needs yet either! Just the talk of "One of the limitations inherent in this approach is that when an application malfunctions, it can affect other programs" made me think they need to look harder at their OS. I will be surprised if the end result isn't IP6 (perhaps a modified army version) but you never know! I wonder what OS they'll go with though?
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
Uh, ever heard of the two armies problem?
Does Al Gore know about this?
The military wants secure and reliable communications, period. From a military standpoint, it might be nice to monitor your adversaries, but not if it means that your adversaries can monitor you. Any intentional weakness in a communications protocol could be exploited by an enemy, making it unsuitable for military purposes. Since the military's opponents are other militaries, they have to assume that the enemy has the resources of an entire country behind it, and plan accordingly. Insecure comms makes the military's job harder. For the military, keeping YOUR comms secure is the first priority; monitoring or disrupting the other side's comms is a bonus.
Law enforcement, on the other hand, is going up against individuals or small groups. The stakes are lower and the adversary has far fewer resources. Insecure comms makes their jobs easier, because they need to monitor the other side a whole lot more than they need to worry about having their communications monitored. Hell, virtually all police departments still use unencrypted radios, despite the fact that scanners have been available to the general public for 30+ years.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
Just a few items that comes to mind:
- The US military needs this for their own use, it does not have to be forced down over the rest of the spam-enjoying (right?) population.
- Asymmetric warfare analysis shows that it is better for the US to fix bugs or information leaks or other holes in software rather than keeping them secret for possible later use. Ref. NSA and their SELinux effort for evidence.
- the above also means that adding extra backdoors will likely backfire. The NSAKEY has the tin foil crowd in hysterics already.
- Encapsulation means you can run IPv7 (to give it a name) over the ordinary IPv4 and then roll out for the rest of the net to use once everyone tires of spam and breakins.
Also they wanted to do "something" with von Neuman architectures. Well, as anyone who has worked with DSPs I can assure you that alternatives are out there and in active everyday use, DSPs like for instance the Motorola DSP56300 that uses super-Harward architecture (one instrution and two data busses). Just why this is such a big deal I do not understand.
Not that I would mind then looking at it; after all compilers (especially GCC) have problems in optimising bus allocation (should this array be on the X or Y bus?). Yeah I know some claim compilers surpass human assembly programmers. Strange ten that people like me are paid (well too!) for hand optimising assembly on DSPs.
Don't forget existing ad-hoc routing protocols that work fine with IPV4 or IPV6, like
dynamic source routing (dsr)
destination sequenced distance vector (dsdv)
temorally ordered routing (tora)
ad-hoc on demand distance vector (dsdv)
comparison paper
Some of these are even used in reasonably large real world networks.
-jim
Actually, the cause of spam can largely be sought in faulty protocols. SMTP doesn't verify who you are, so spammers are very difficult to trace. If this were changed, I think there would be a lot fewer spammers.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Oh, the moaning, oh, the bitching.
:)
Has it occurred to anyone else that DoD might not be out to reform the Internet in any way? They are out to build a network model to serve their own needs, but they have no need to reform the rest of the world.
Now, if they make this revolutionizing new network protocol/infrastructure public other people might want to adopt it because it's neat. But me being a hardened cynic, this will most likely only find use in privately owned networking ponds...Kinda like a certain version pf IP we all know of
It made me come dangerously close to reading the article.
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
--Mike---
Flaws in the basic building blocks of networking and computer science... "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?"
This is the only interesting part of the article. I couldn't care less what they do with the OSI layers. As long as someone writes about it as well as Stevens wrote about TCP/IP, it'll take me a month of reading and programming to get under my belt. We all learned Pascal, then C++, then C++ again when the standard came out, then Java, and Lisp, and Smalltalk, and Perl, andd Python, and C#, and a half-dozen more languages as the need came up. Now, you have to learn a few new networking layers and protocols. No big deal -- you should be pretty damned familiar with learning different implementations of stuff you already understand.
But, replacing the von Neumann architecture means changing just about everything I know. That's big. Everything is von Neumann. All the computational models, all the theory, all the basic underpinnings of what I know... it's all pretty much out the window once von Neumann goes. It's not just a dozen evenings at home with a book and reference implementation to relearn all of that stuff, either. It's relearning nearly all the Computer Science I know, and probably learning a whole bunch of new Maths to go with it.
That's gonna hurt.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
DARPA and the military aren't interested in rebuilding the internet, they are interested in rebuilding IP.
They want to rebuild IP because they have a need for a better system. They need secure, reliable, ad hoc networking so that battle groups can communicate with each other.
These are private WANs. Not the Internet! The Military is not going to send real time battlefield data across the public internet, and real time battlefield data is what this thing is all about. The military launches and rents satellites for that sort of thing, they don't send it across uunet.
When they create a WAN, they have to have some mechanism to talk. Right now it might be IP, but in the future they want it to be something else. Something better for THEM.
The US Military couldn't care less if the rest of the world, or the internet itself, started to use whatever they come up with.
As far as those attacking technical limitations, when they started working on the original internet I'm sure everyone was saying, "Fault tolerant distributed networking with dynamic routing? That's impossible, why are they bothering" The point of DARPA is to do science and advance the field beyond current knowledge.
They may succeed, and they may fail. But they shouldn't just not try.
...when he invented the internet?
Map the cells in the state tables to appear as conventional RAM to the host, and reprogramming becomes as easy as a memory write. Bad cell?, just route around it. The fact that it's all state driven allows you to build an automated rerouter almost trivially.
post Von Neuman computers are going to be wicked fast, if they can build IO to keep up with them.
--Mike--
They are of course fully entitled to invent as many protocols as they need for their own use, and it is probably a good thing, but unless it goes through the RFC process, it will never be accepted for general use by the public.
This is really a big non-event.
Don't forget massive incompatibility and upgrade hassles.
Yeah, just like that PCI bus clusterfuck. What a nightmare that was. Was ISA really so bad that we all had to buy new motherboards and expansion cards? Oh wait, yes it was.
Sometimes if you want to move forward you have to pick up your feet.
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
Now that I have read the article, I finally concluded it's full of shit. I'll break it down bit by bit:
... the seven-layer Open Systems Interconnection model''
..."''
``Among the IT holy grails that DARPA wants to see revamped are
Well, they can't. It's just a model, an abstraction. It's not like networks are actually built by looking at the OSI model and carefully following it. It's more like you build your network infrastructure and protocols, and then the OSI model says that you can call your wires the physical layer, the software that does something with the network the application layer, etc.
``Many military commanders have been slow to adapt IT for critical tasks because they sense the equipment is unreliable''
Well, that's their judgment, but what does it have to do with the Internet protocol?
``"We don't expect computers to work, we expect them to have a problem."''
I guess many people do, but I don't. I buy my computer and expect it to work. If it doesn't, I'll return it and get a working one or my money back.
``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.''
Right he is. Reliability is in TCP, and this is why most application protocols build on TCP. The unrealiability of IP is there on purpose, so we don't have the overhead of TCP when it's not needed, and that if we come up with a better alternative to TCP, we can use that instead without having to throw away IP. Conversely, we can exchange IPv4 for IPv6 and implement TCP on top of that. It's called modular design, and generally considered a Good Thing.
``"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."''
Ok, fine, so you need a real-time protocol. I can see how that wouldn't work with IP's best-effort (read: unreliable) delivery, without further guarantees. However, there is nothing in IP that says it _has_ to lose packets. If you find a way to guarantee timely delivery of packets (my bet is that you can't), then you can layer IP on top of that. Of course, you don't _have_ to use IP, but if you opt for a different protocol, that doesn't mean that I have to drop IP too.
``Another limitation with the IP approach is the inability to dynamically build networks. The military wants to quickly set up ad hoc networks.''
I don't think that's true. Just like there is nothing in IP that _prevents_ guaranteed delivery, there is nothing in it that prevents building dynamic networks, either.
``"... Moving the node outside its standard service area requires reconfiguring something.
Yes, necessarily. However, the implication seems to be that IP somehow cannot handle this. Again, there is nothing in IP to prevent this. You could simply broadcast a message to discover nearby access points, and attach to the one with the strongest signal. Periodically, or when the signal gets weak, you broadcast again.
``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.''
Like ZeroConf? That would be a Good Thing. More power to them.
``The von Neumann architecture will also come under scrutiny from DARPA.''
I won't comment on that. I don't know what exactly the Von Neumann architecture is, and besides it is off-topic in my discussion on network protocols.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The purpose of protocols is to transmit information in an understandable manner. If you want privacy, either stop transmitting information or render it non-understandable (ie., encryption). It makes no sense to bitch about someone's effort to improve the state of the Internet.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Sure.. it's called the Internet Protocol.. but that doesn't mean it's gonna replace what we're using now..
Anyone who thinks that the DOD will run drones with publicly available IP addressing schemes, has been spending a little too much time behind the ole peacepipe..
This will probably use a propriatary signalling method.. special packet sizes with some form of encrytion built right into the protocol at layer 3.. if not layer 2..
just because the DOD builds a new network.. doesn't mean we all get access to it.. it's no longer 1970 here folks.. the DOD doesn't need berkley anymore..
Thanks for the lesson.
--Mike--
I don't understand why there seems to be such a problem. If Yahoo! & AOL worked together on this, then @ least all mail going between those 2 sites could be verified. Thus, if somebody sends a message from 1 of those 2 places to the other, then that means that that mail is really from somebody, even if it is a spammer. Any other mail pretending to be from there can be deleted.
As this gains success, they could expand the efforts to include other companies.
testing out my trending skills
Most companies don't even use the full power of their current networks, installed in the late 90's or early 00's. Would they be willing to throw out all the old stuff to get the new stuff? I doubt it...most of them are still hurting from over spending in the first place.
$8.95/mo web hosting
The article makes sense if you think in terms of CS (computer science) instead of IT. The IP protocol is what he's talking about, and it has all the problems he describes (both version 4 and 6).
From a consumer, there are some room for improvement (not just needed for military). Think of the headaches of wireless VOIP, mesh networking, p2p, etc. yes they all work, but there are workarounds due to the fixed node-to-node setup of IP. A lot of cool things could be made a lot easier by thinking outside the box a bit now that we've gained experince from the old model. there are tons of projects being thought up which have to tackle the IP nature of networks. If the low-level protocol handled a lot of it already, we could have those projects up and running and then some.
I'd love a protocol that didn't rely on a centralized DB of addresses to allow stuff to talk. That's one of the first things IP demands. How about networks routing based on data the nodes provide? That's just one idea of a different type of network...
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
Sounds like the DoD has some simple requirements. I thought some of these were taken care of by ip6?
The main requirement seems to be self-configuring mobile networks and services.
I suppose nobody wants to renumber IP addresses every time a battleship moves from one theatre to another. Imagine having to move a whole division from one place to another, and having to reconfigure all the appropriate devices. What a nightmare. Plus, you wouldn't be able to find anything anymore.
They could move to zeroconf/rendevous for their network service naming, which is a bit better than a static address/conf file.
But they still have routing issues. Maybe they should adapt the cell network routing? Cell providers seem to have a better idea about how to dynamically route information to devices that change location often. Phones have a unique address which is tracked by the network...or at least it behaves that way.
Then there's the security side. How do you authenticate/authorize someone when they try and join the network? You don't want to lose a laptop then have someone be able to watch your operation. Biometric stuff won't work so well, because they can always cut off a hand and use it without the user attached (ugh).
Pretty interesting problems, really.
Consider a swarm of several thousand minimissiles, each with an assigned target. As some are shot down, the others negotiate in real time to shift targets so that highest priorities are met, including in response to new threats that emerge after the swarm was lost.
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Now -- try doing that with IPv4 or even IPv6 model, painstakingly assembling frames into packets and packets into messages
The architecture issue is a whole nuther matter. Consider the use of neural nets to filter noise from information in shifting signals, as tracked by a matrix of thousands of sensors
DARPA couldn't care less about your pr0n surfing, guys. The game is much bigger than that
First -
/.), back in June 2003 the DoD already mandated that IPv6 would become THE standard for DoD information systems (note; NOT the Internet). The DoD Global Information Grid will be IPv6 compliant by 2008 and all products procured by the DoD will be IPv6 compliant and will not support IPv4. This is a good thing for the DoD and could potentially be a good thing for the Internet because of the end-to-end security designed in IPv6. Tin foil hatters need not worry - the DoD does not listen in on your pr0n surfing packet traffic in IPv4 now, they certainly won't with IPv6 (it would indeed have to be a VERY slow analysis day at NSA, too).
For those with a short attention span (pretty much all of
Second -
The DoD has always recognized the need for fast and secure wireless communications in the battle space. The DoD needs have always boiled down to these basic requirements -
Real time, on time, reliable, and secure.
Note that TCP/IP does not always guarantee real time or on time but is reliable in delivery. Security? IPv4 was not really designed with security in mind - rather, the idea was to ensure that the information arrived intact to be reassembled.
The real problem is the wireLESS systems that are stove-piped into the GIG. Battlefield bandwidth is still a problem with most field radios (SINCGARS and EPLRS) that transferring large amounts of data is a slow process on a battlefield that requires up to the minute information. This is the real reason that the USMTF and JVMF messages still exist in this day and age. Field radios were designed with vocomms in mind, not pumping large data formats across FH channels with limited bandwidth. Mind you, these radios must operate in extreme conditions on a battlefield, so an 802.11b/g card won't cut it in terms of broadcast power nor encryption standard with WEP.
So, if your bandwidth is limited, you must either make the messages smaller and have less overhead, or make the OSI stack smaller and with less injected junk in the frame. Either way, the newer C4I systems are using more up-to-date formats and tools to get information to and from the battle commanders and the soldiers.
Flaws in the basic building blocks of networking and computer science... "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?"
Sigh... I guess it's back to building the Analytic Engine... Pass me the lathe, will ya...
Most people seem to miss the fact that the R in DARPA stands for Research. Research is not done by accepting the status quo. If ARPA had not invested in the original network research, who knows were we would be today!
TCP/IP is not perfect for every use. If DARPA can find a better set of protocols to slide into layers three and four of the OSI model, more power to them.
Internet protocol suite
For every problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious and wrong.
My dream is that a redesigned Internet Protocol will continue to be lean and mean, and not over-bloated with "if we only had this feature then we could do that".
Where have these guys *been* for the last, oh, *fifty* years? One guy doesn't know that guaranteed delivery isn't IP's job because that belongs to another layer, and seems to be unaware that adaptive routing has been in the Internet for decades; another apparently never heard of the memory mapping and protection that's been standard in most computers longer than many of today's hotshot programmers have lived. DHCP and the built-in address initialization stuff in IPv6 (cribbed from earlier work in OSI, btw) are apparently unknown at DARPA.
Did I miss something?
Since this is a DoD project, its primary use will be for military networks. Perhaps there will be a trickle down to an "Internet 4" system through technology sharing. I don't see this changing the internet we currently use anytime soon. What it will change is how battlefield command systems and forward deployed units will communicate with each other. Establishing a network connection via traditional microwave, satellite, wired, and wireless (this is the key....wireless) will now exchange data using the DARPA protocol instead of IP.
How nice would it be to have a soldier (or any other unit you wish to deem a "node" on your network) be able to "uplink" to the required military network (battlefield or otherwise) simply by broadcasting to the network. No need to configure a DHCP Server (in the case of dynamic allocation) to dish out an IP address...there is no more IP. I think that is what DARPA is attempting to achieve. They want the military to have a secure, easily scalable, and always available network infrastructure. How they plan to accomplish this...who knows, although it would probably be something similar to IPv6 where everything (network accessible device) has its own hardware created identifier. Perhaps like "DNA" for the hardware. Anyone own stock in Motorola? No? Perhaps it's time to buy some.
To know is to have knowledge....to understand is to be enlightened.
IPv4 and IPv6 have a slight ugliness people have come to take for granted. This could be fixed for IPv7.
:-)
The concept of "ports". Ports are actually in-host entity identifiers, while the IP address itself is an in-network entity identifier.
There should really be only one type of entity identifier, especially when it is 128-bit long.
The idea is that the last few bits of an IP address would typically serve the function of a "port". This way, a DNS server could translate names to much more specific entities than full hosts. It would allow hosting multiple FTP servers on the same host, for example, without the clients having to connect to different ports. It would dissolve the need for the silly ad-hoc workarounds with virtual web hosts.
This kind of addressing also allows much simplification of applications that would no longer need to use multiplexing over their connections. Instead, each application could allocate addressable "entities" and the multiplexing can be handled by the network layer.
Finally, it would eliminate the need for the UDP protocol entirely, as in-host identifying becomes part of the network layer itself.
TCP-layer becomes simpler as there is no need to handle in-host addressing as well.
Lets eliminate ports, for a simpler network protocol
While the interview is light on details, there is more information available online.
Don't forget how the system works. Darpa basically hands out money for research into areas it finds interesting. Coincidently, I've been involved for a short time in a research project dealing with exchanging present day IP (mostly the heavyweight gorilla listening to the name TCP) with smaller, more adaptable alternatives.
Two projects in this field that I've heard of
are
the knowledge plane and
application private networks
The basic idea, AFAIK, is to do away with the one size fits all model of networking and replace it with a more adaptive lego-like stack. For this to work you need information on the state of the network in order to build your optimal dynamic stack. A possible source for this might be the discussed knowledge plane. Also, actual micro-protocols need to be created and some sort of decision making system must be in place (APnets). Shameless plug of my own work
here.
I don't know of other projects, but if Darpa has opened its wallet for this cause you can expect many other universities to have similar initiatives underway.