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).

Comments

Superb talk: "data dissemination" not mcast/cache

[Morgaine]

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. :-)

Re:Decline of text

[Peaker]

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).