David Clark: Rebuild the Internet

boarder8925 writes "David Clark, who led the development of the internet in the 1970s, is working with the National Science Foundation on a plan for a whole new infrastructure to replace today's global network. The NSF aims to put out a request for proposals in the fall for plans and designs that could lead to what Clark called a 'clean slate' internet architecture. Those designs, Clark said, could be tested on the National LambdaRail, the nationwide optical network that researchers are using to experiment with new networking technologies and applications."

Comments

Wont happend

[Bruj0]

"A whole new infraestructure" you say?.
We cant even start using the new ipv6 protocol. I dont think we are there yet. Try in 10 or so years.

Re:Wont happend

[drmerope]

Might be because we realized that the IPV6 protocol was unnecessary.

Once people were forced to NAT, it suddently dawned on the great mass of people that workstations shouldn't be getting public IPs for security and management reasons.

Nor for that matter should these up and coming embedded devices be placed on the public internet either. It just isn't appropriate.

Remember: The Internet was supposed to be a network of networks NOT _THE NETWORK_.

Most of the remaining IP allocation problems result from certain lingering gross misallocations such as the Class A block assigned to MIT.

Re:Wont happend

[J. Random Luser]

... certain lingering gross misallocations ...


6.0.0.0/8 DoD Network Information Center
7.0.0.0/8 Defense Information Systems Agency
8.0.0.0/8 Level 3 Communications, Inc
9.0.0.0/8 IBM Corporation
11.0.0.0/8 DoD Intel Information Systems
12.0.0.0/8 AT&T WorldNet Services
13.0.0.0/8 Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
15, 16.0.0.0/8 Hewlett-Packard Company
17.0.0.0/8 Apple Computer, Inc.
18.0.0.0/8 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
19.0.0.0/8 Ford Motor Company
20.0.0.0/8 Computer Sciences Corporation
21, 22.0.0.0/8 DoD Network Information Center
25.0.0.0/8 Royal Signals and Radar Establishment
26, 28, 29, 30.0.0.0/8 DoD Network Information Center
32.0.0.0/8 AT&T Global Network Services
33.0.0.0/8 DoD Network Information Center
34.0.0.0/8 Halliburton Company
35.0.0.0/8 Merit Network Inc.
38.0.0.0/8 Performance Systems International Inc.
40.0.0.0/8 Eli Lilly and Company
41.0.0.0/8 African Network Information Center
44.0.0.0/8 Amateur Radio Digital Communications
45.0.0.0/8 Interop Show Network
47.0.0.0/8 Bell-Northern Research
48.0.0.0/8 Prudential Securities Inc.
51.0.0.0/8 Department of Social Security of UK
52.0.0.0/8 E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Co., Inc.
53.0.0.0/8 cap debis ccs (c/o Mercedes Benz AG
54.0.0.0/8 Merck and Co., Inc.
55.0.0.0/8 DoD Network Information Center
56.0.0.0/8 U.S. Postal Service
57.0.0.0/8 SITA-Societe Internationale de Telecommunications Aeronautiques
1,2,3,4,5,14, 23, 27, 31, 36, 37, 39, 42, 46, 49, 50 are reserved to IANA

It would be tempting to say: Nothing to see here people... please move along..., but amongst all the squatters is one new allocation, a single class A net allocated this year for the entire African continent. It works too, I've already had two 419s from it ;-)

Not gonna happen

[btgreat]

"A super-high-speed internet could even allow people a world apart to collaborate inside elaborate 3-D virtual arenas, a process called tele-immersion."

I believe the technical term for this is MMORPG. It appears to work pretty well with our current internet.

All joking aside, I don't think anything will change any time in the near future. IPv6 is probably the most radical change the internet will see for possibly decades to come, and that can't even catch on. People are simply not going to pay to have the internet re-architected when it is working well enough as it is; why reinvent the wheel while its still rolling. Things along these lines have been proposed before, and I'm sure will be proposed again, and I'm sure that one day, the internet will eventually be rewired. However, this is still far ahead of its time.

Cars still ride on wheels, power still goes out with storms, and cell phones still lose service underground. What makes anyone think the internet is going to be any different.

Not a bad idea...

[evilviper]

I'll agree with him that Internet2 hasn't lived-up to what it should have been, and trying something completely different would be a very good idea.

However, I don't agree that the current internet is in-need of replacement. Creating TCP/IP packets requires significant processing power, and a simpler protocol would mean more devices being online, but by the time anything new becomes accepted, a $1 chip will be able to do it all.

If you want to improve the internet, put explicit congestion notification back into all TCP stacks, as it was before the BSD stack left it out... Goodbye massive packet loss due to minor congestion. Require all vendors to support jumbo frames... And many more small changes (to the existing internet).