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Researchers Scheming to Rebuild Internet From Scratch
BobB writes "Stanford University researchers have launched an initiative called the Clean Slate Design for the Internet. The project aims to make the network more secure, have higher throughput, and support better applications, all by essentially rebuilding the Internet from scratch. From the article: 'Among McKeown's cohorts on the effort is electrical engineering Professor Bernd Girod, a pioneer of Internet multimedia delivery. Vendors such as Cisco, Deutsche Telekom and NEC are also involved. The researchers already have projects underway to support their effort: Flow-level models for the future Internet; clean slate approach to wireless spectrum usage; fast dynamic optical light paths for the Internet core; and a clean slate approach to enterprise network security (Ethane).'"
Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the techonology. We can make it better, faster, stronger.
I haven't even upgraded to Internet2 and Web 2.0 and they're already doing work on Internet3.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Is someone going to call Al Gore and get his opinion on this?
...but the biggest hurdle is convincing people not to connect to these shiny new networks until it's all in place, end-to-end. It seems like this would have to be physically secured while it is being put together.
Did you ever get the feeling the story is too damn long and in the present tense?
What are the odds that, even given a great plan, that this has any hope of making it to daylight. IPv6 has been out for how long, yet how much real adoption have we seen in that space?
Can be found here, is linked to within the first link provided in the summary.
One of the most interesting criteria for a new internet, to me, was criteria #7:
Support anonymity where prudent, and accountability where necessary.
Maybe it's just me, but it seems true anonymity is becoming more and more important, and less and less available, as governments snoop more on the internet.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Most corporate networks make sense when they were first deployed, but that was back in the 80s and the technology (not to mention corporate layout) has changed enough that it seems crazy today. I know our tech guys here work really hard to keep everything up to date, and for the most part our network is sane, but sometimes there are cases of legacy systems that really look out of place next to everything else.
I want to know how they're going to avoid the second system effect with their new internet. One of the big reasons the Internet works is because a lot of effort was spent in keeping everything reasonably simple. Time has shown that anything that start out highly complicated tends to be only very slowly adopted, if at all. IP may have terrible security but at least it doesn't require someone 10 man-years to build a fully compliant router.
I read the internet for the articles.
I think it was called OS/2. Or maybe 68000. Or was it Itanium?
If they make a second Slashdot, I hope it will have a better dupe checker.
Unless this is being run by the IETF with EFF looking over their shoulder the whole time, I don't trust this to end up as something I want to use.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
"There's never time to do it right, but always time to do it over."
Thats it... I'm gona make my OWN internet. With blackjack, and hookers. In fact, forget about the blackjack and the internet.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Let's get the guys that designed all those "wonderful" networks:
Oh yeah, let's get the "EXPERTS" involved!
Get rid of the porn? That's what the internet is for. Everything else is just interfering with porn.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What's wrong with porn? The network design shouldn't care about content. That's a place for your personal morals or corporate rules, not network topology.
Translation:
Lets rebuild the internet because it uses too much open source software and we are not making enough money. I know! Lets get all the vendors together and rebuild it using proprietary crud so that it is impossible for any of these "open source" guys to make server platforms that are freely available.
Lets kill open standards too, because well....who needs those IETF guys anyway! They are just a bunch hippies!
Seriously, though. The internet works better than my cell phone does.
It doesn't need "fixing".
It just needs a few upgrades.
IPV6 would be a nice place to start!
GAD.
The thought of CISCO having a hand in anything the future internet could be makes me want to quit my current network manager job and open an Italian Restraunt.
-gc
-hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
It is just a bunch of tubes right?
Actually they discovered the problem is that the current internet is a bunch of tubes. Tubes get clogged. The new internet will be big trucks you dump stuff on.
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
or, rather, no, lets not.
(and it got about as much attention as ipv6. they both planned for 'big networks' but we all know how popular OSI is, in the real world...)
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Which doesn't talk to anything.
If it's going to be useful, it has to talk to everything, that's the whole point of the network effect.
Deleted
I would put the odds of this getting implemented at practically nil. If you do not fundamentally redesign most/all of the protocols, you are just refining IPv4/IPv6 to suit your needs. And if in fact you did come up with a "from scratch" design you have the following hurdles to meet:
-port all known software/libs to use the new protocols
-get all vendors of networking equip to issue major firmware upgrades to switches/hubs/firewalls anything that speaks on the network.
-rewrite networking code for top 6 most popular OS's.
-finally port IOS, JunOS, on all the last hardware models of the last 10 years.
then you might be ready to actually implement something, that is of course if you can then talk a good percentage of the planets ISP/Corp/home users to actually upgrade everything for you.
Case in Point: IPv6
It has been around for a decade. it has been ported and deployed onto most major platforms. There is even app and NAT translators on the routers to ease you into it. There is a well known and defined migration path. The US Govt has mandated migration to IPv6 by 2009 (I think).
And you *still* cant get people/corps to start the migration.
We already have a internet, small incremental changes (MPLS,IPv6) are barely tolerated as long as its super easy and you have a big gain.
start from scratch? you are a little late for that.
For example, I am interested in the question - how would Unix work differently if extended attributes were available in all Unix filesystems from the beginning. Tradition often holds back innovation, I feel
Fully agreed. For instance, NTFS supports alternate data streams, which are essentially really huge extended attributes. (They're a generalized version of HFS's resource and data forks. A number of other filesystems support similar things now too, such as HFS+, ZFS, and ReiserFS4 v4 in a slightly different manner.)
But the problem is that no one uses them because nothing was built to work with them. If you upload a file with the alternate streams, you lose the streams. If you copy a file to a floppy (yeah, I know) or USB drive, you lose the streams. If you dual boot and copy the file to ext3, you lose the streams. If you say 'cat file1 > file2', with the Unix model this is the same as copying a file, but it would lose streams. The same applies for extended attributes, though maybe slightly less. (Like I don't know if copying a file between two ext3 filesystems will lose them or not.)
It's very frustrating, because there are a lot of really neat things that you could envision doing with this sort of metadata, but no one has support for it.
So I've wondered almost the exact same thing myself... if in 1970, someone added extended attributes/streams to Unix, what would it look like today?
(Of course, I also wonder about things like "what would the world be like if water's heat of fusion was a quarter of what it is" brought about by the spring thaw that's in progress...)
Why bother posting anonymously if you're going to have your username in the screenshot, eldavojohn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Mail_2000
The name is crappy, but the concept is a really good start. It's a shame this never caught on. Basically, Email's Subjects and Bodies are split, and the Subject is sent to the Receiver, and the Body is stored at the Sender's server. When the Receiver gets the Subject notification, they connect to the Sender's server and download the Body.
The point of this strange scheme would be to crush spammers under the weight of their own To list, by having millions of incoming connections. The burden of storage goes to the Sender, not the Receiver.
That should be one of the technologies Web 11.0 should implement. Somebody call up Al Gore and tell him this.
How much of this effort do you think is oriented around builind content managment and DRM like tools into the internet at the foundation. I say leave it as it is. If people need something better let them build it for themselves. The internet just isn't that broken that it couldn't be fixed by simple things like... browsers conforming to standards etc. When you get into all this talk about multimedia content delivery etc, that's just something you build new networks for which layer funtionality on top of the internet in a way that's invisible to end users. Any effort to rethink the way the internet works has more potential to add even more problems than to fix anything.
How will this help me look at boobies more efficiently?
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There are several mechanisms for running IPv4 and IPv6 side by side, and that was a major part of the discussion in the IPv6 rollout early on. Medium sized chunks of the net were running IPv6 for quite a while, and were routed in and out of fairly seamlessly.
transition mechanisms were designed, long before IPv6 was adopted by the IETF. (the linked RFC is from 1995).
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IPv6 designers also put in tools designed to provide for mobile endpoints, although better designs have come out since.
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IPv6 provides and uses multicast addresses as part of it's initial design, and its multicast is being used successfully.
You can claim that the implementations provided weren't good enough (although I'd like to see some actual data to back that up), but in fact the folks that did IPv6 did have all of those goals in mind when they put IPv6 together.- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
"Outrageous! The rich treated the same as the poor!" They want an internet in which a porn movie downloaded by a CEO preempts and disturbs a critical communication from a hospital to an investigation center.
The internet as we have it is an open field. A dumb, simple, protocol so that people can innovate in the sides. This enabled us to be independent from ISP and to design new protocols (Gnutella, Bittorrent, etc.). Of course, they now say that this "dumbness" produced lack of innovation:
It's not clear to me how having a more complex internet in the middle will be able to ease its growth. It seems as the opposite, as more complex middleware will be more complex to upgrade and setup. In fact, the main reason the current internet has "ossificated" *is* dumbness in the middle, but other kind of dumbness. The commercial companies' dumb administrators, dumb managers, who didn't care to provide us multicast, IPv6, mobile ip, IPsec, etc.
The Internet as we have it could never had happened if it were for the private sector. It's too open, private companies don't like standards. See how the classical internet infrastructure got frozen when the commercial companies took over internet in the last century. HTTP, IMAP, POP, HTML, etc. got stuck in their last versions. It's because Internet needs a strong *public* presence. Companies can exist, provide service, but Internet needs a strong presence by the people (in the form of the state..? Universities? I don't know...)
This group is not aiming at a better, utopic, internet. They are trying to recapture what they've lost when their CCITT (X.25, X.400, X.500) network wreck.
When I looked at the title of the article I had a strong surge of hope followed by a suddent concern for job security and visions of decreasing demand for highly skilled professionals. Well, after overviewing the white paper I was feeling completely secure and once again disappointed.
:), ouch, :)!
I find most of the propositions as things that need to get done, but overall it looks like just another patch, although a huge one. Majority of it deals with reevaluating design of the physical layer components and their integration, and although grandiose the rest looks like a list of bugs needed to be fixed.
Seriously, in order to rebuild internet from scratch, most if not all of software dealing with networking would have to be rewritten in order to go from the 5 layer model to the more proper 7 layer model. That would mean pretty much rewriting huge chunks of linux, unix, apache, throwing out billiions of lines of code and eventually seeing a significant decline in the demand for both hardware and software. On the positive note, it might also cripple windoze, dealing it a death blow.
It is nice to see that Stanford is at least considering to reexamine the subject, since we pretty much owe it them for being stuck with 5 layers
I found the concept of rebuilding the internet from scratch quite exciting. Now that we have some thirty years of experience with the old one, what a difference we could make with a new one, while at the same time having a much better understanding of how to build a network that will sustain continuing evolution on into the future.
There are a few essential things missing from the Stanford proposal. I didn't see anything to suggest that they are looking for this to be a truly international collaboration. If it isn't, that would be a very short sited omission. Also needed are the inclusion of social scientists capable of making some value judgments and decisions about how the proposed new internet can encourage social inclusion and break down the digital divide, and political scientists who can suggest how the proposed new internet can enhance democracy and international harmony.
Obviously, as the article stated, there will be resistance from current stakeholders who depend on the internet remaining as it is. Advocates of net neutrality are obviously very concerned, but it doesn't have to be the way they imagine. Imagine every packet has fields in the header that indicate its particular needs, whether that is for guaranteed delivery latency, or low jitter, or priority level, (even varying packet sizes may be useful) and every packet priced. Those of you who download entire movies via BitTorrent will be able to save money by just dropping the packet delivery priority. Really, if you want a certain movie, usually it doesn't matter if you get it today or tomorrow or next week. Imagine if you could set the priority - and the corresponding price per packet so low that it takes a whole week to deliver, but costs you only pennies?
The thing is - the current internet IS broken. The article states that current economics can't sustain it as it is, without going into much detail. They do state as evidence, however, that six out of the seven biggest ISPs have had to restructure in an attempt to sustain profitability. Our society (and more to the point, our economies) are growing more dependent on the internet day by day, but we dare not depend on it as we do. In its current state, it is just too vulnerable. It seems quite possible that some country could declare war and launch endless DOS and other attacks to such a degree that it could cripple our economy.
Imagine if our telephones worked the way the internet works now. Over 90% of all the phone calls we receive would be somebody trying to sell us something. We would be getting calls from people in Nigeria asking our help in reclaiming fortunes. When we call our bank, we may actually end up talking to a phisherman trying to steal our money without realizing it. There would be periods when we simply couldn't call out because of endless incoming calls in a denial of service attempt. I am sure many readers could take this analogy a long ways, but I have made my point. In my opinion, only good can come from the Stanford research if they open to broader input.