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A New Way to Look at Networking
Van Jacobson gave a Google Tech Talk on some of his ideas of how a modern, global network could work more effectively, and with more trust in the data which changes many hands on its journey to its final destination.
Watch the talk on Google's site
The man is very smart and his ideas are fascinating. He has the experience and knowledge to see the big picture and what can be done to solve some of the new problems we have. He starts with the beginning of the phone networks and then goes on to briefly explain the origins of the ARPAnet and its evolution into the Internet we use today.
He explains the problems that were faced while using the phone networks for data, and how they were solved by realizing that a new problem had risen and needed a new, different solution. He then goes to explain how the Internet has changed significantly from the time it started off in research centres, schools, and government offices into what it is today (lots of identical bytes being redundantly pushed to many consumers, where broadcast would be more appropriate and efficient).
"He then goes to explain how the Internet has changed significantly from the time it started off in research centres, schools, and government offices into what it is today (lots of identical bytes being redundantly pushed to many consumers, where broadcast would be more appropriate and efficient)."
Multicast.
The talk was held on Aug 30, 2006.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
How is this anything new? Everything in that summary was already covered by Tanenbaum in his excellent book on networks - of course it's easier to hear it from someone if you're too lazy to read :p
I have spoken'eth.
I think he's trying to push the internet into a bittorrent/usenet type of model. Instead of everyone grabbing a copy from the original server and eating up the bandwidth on the major backbones, we get the information from a more local server that have a cached copy. I believe from an ISP level, he's trying to reduce the WAN usage and keep things on the LAN. To an extent I think ISP are favoring this already, bittorrent is kinda frowned on, but they allow you download tv shows off the usenet server with a nzb file.
Brought to you by Team SPAM! where we believe: "Information in the noise!"
I run an IRC server of sorts, and over 90% of my outgoing bandwidth bill is due to identical information being sent at the same time to many clients. Not a day goes by I don't wish there was some sort of error-correcting multicast protocol.
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
- Only people actively downloading or seeding content are available to redistribute it, so there's a built-in time-dependence which makes in unsuitable for small pieces of data.
- It has no knowledge of topology, so it can't take advantage of topology to cache data closer to endpoints.
I wish someone had asked about freenet, since that seems much closer to what he describes."If you look 'round the table and can't tell who the sucker is, it's you." -- Quiz Show
I enjoyed this talk very much. It was more than just a statement of Van Jacobson's thoughts on data dissemination. It showed his analysis of the relationship between infrastructure and application across two generations of networking, and it pointed out very nicely why it's time now for phase 3: we've moved our usage goalposts compared to when the IP network was designed. Great stuff, and I agree completely.
:-)
:-)
The article submitter didn't seem to "get" what Van Jacobson was saying though, as the talk had almost nothing to do with broadcasting or multicasting. Indeed, Van Jacobson actually pointed out why multicasting and broadcasting were inappropriate in most situations in this new world (they carry implicit time sync), so only use them as accelerators on LANs or in other special cases. The slightly wrong article description may have misdirected some of the posts here since not everybody reads TFA, and even fewer sit through an extended talk. It wasn't about broadcast or multicast at all, except in passing.
Maybe it'll help to summarize his thrust briefly.
What he said was that the network underneath doesn't actually matter, and that the wires and fibre underneath don't actually matter either -- TCP/IP has abstracted away from them. However, the client-server model on which TCP/IP is based is no longer strictly relevant either, because it is founded on a somewhat obsolete concept, the "conversation". The vast bulk of our Internet traffic is no longer "conversations", but "data dissemination" (the migration of identified data objects from place to place), and actual conversations are just a special case of that.
Data dissemination is utterly different to conversation as a communications paradigm, and that's what he's getting at. Fully identified, self-validating items of data as discrete entities are really where our focus needs to be, and how they get to us is rather immaterial, or abstracted away. *Where* they come from (ie. the actual server to which we connect) is quite immaterial too --- getting it from a passing plane would be as good as from a known server, when you can rely on data identity. Furthermore, if the data items were fully self-descriptive then many of the current problems like spam would go away as well. What's more, the nodes of the network would be able to work more intelligently too (and hence efficiently), if they were aware of data identity rather than just treat everything as a conversation.
That's a very brief summary and can't hope to do the talk justice. Go listen! He's dead right.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
You give a pretty good short summary of a long and interesting talk.
One thing I pulled most out of it was the analogy to 60s and 70s networking and how it is only after technology has been adopted that we see what its used for.
When the telephone was invented Bell didn't know what it would be used for, its a strange concept but he really didn't know what a "phone call" was. He just knew he could transmit voice. Not only that but you had to have wires to connect people, so there was this very expensive business of putting wires everywhere. What happened was that people used those wires to make conversations. To establish a conversation you had to have a path between two nodes. This encouraged a monopoly because the best known way to make paths was to have control of all the wires.
When the idea of what TCP/IP was to become was introduced people thought it was lunacy. What they were proposing was adding all this crap onto your data to explicitly name your destination so that it could travel any path to get to its conversation partner. All the networking researchers didn't get it because they already had implicit addresses by way of making the path. Turns out that the supposed innefficiency solved several problems simply by construction. Being able to take any path meant not caring about the underlying topology.
What Van Jacobsen is proposing is another abstraction. Essentially adding another layer of "crap" that will allow us to ignore the underlying network. He mentions how several technologies are working towards these ends to some degree like bittorrent and akami CDN, but I think he is advocating for something like a new protocol. This new protocol would then end up solving some of our current problems simply by construction. Broadcast and one-to-one will become the same thing. Whether you are sending a secure email (pgp signed and named) or downloading the front page of the nytimes you could rely on the nature of the new protocol to deliver you authentic data, no matter where it comes from.
Personally I think its genius, I'd like to follow the progress of such a protocol if it exists. I just got done watching the talk so I'll be googling around for a little I suppose.
"how can they call it a MINE if everything here is THEIRS?!?!" -Straight Jacket
I thought I was going to skim through that video when I first saw it a while ago.
Then I started watching, and at some point noticed I watched the whole thing, without skipping anything.
I think he gives a good talk, and it kept me interested the whole way.
Its a very nice insight he has there, too bad it flies way over Slashdotters head (well, its just that almost all of them probably didn't even read the whole thing).
By the way, I summarized his ideas (as I understood them, which may not be the same as he explained them).