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

Multicasting on a segmented network

[charnov]

There is no reason you can't multicast across a large segmented network, i.e. the internet, and get good delivery. Radio, television, audio, phone, movies are all latency sensitive but not particularly bit sensitive so you can drop some packets here and there. That also means that some things would need QoS (VoIP) while others would need intelligent caching and buffering (movies, etc.).

Internet is not TV

[Dun Malg]

"(lots of identical bytes being redundantly pushed to many consumers, where broadcast would be more appropriate and efficient)"

The first part is true, but does not necessarily lead to the conclusion in the second. There is a huge, very important IF that belongs between them. Specifically, "if the recipients are all prepared to receive those bytes at the same time". The problem with the conclusion is that the evaluation of the "if" part is nearly always "they're not". This is yet another case of "if the internet were like television, it'd be more efficient". Yes, but it would then no longer be the internet people like. The great promise of the internet is information on demand. All this bullcrap about broadcast, push, and the like, it's all the efforts of 20th century throwbacks trying to fit the internet into their outdated worldview of "producers" and "consumers". They need to quit it. Broadcast is a square peg and the internet is a round hole. Every time anyone suggests putting the two together, they simply look like a bloody idiot.

Re:Internet is not TV

[Yvanhoe]

Internet is information on demand, but given a large amount of demands, some of the demands are redundant. For instance, it would make a lot of sense for a local ISP to cache the google homepage. Also, when making a modification on said homepage, it would make sense for Google to broadcast a signal to all ISPs to update their caches, or even to broadcast the new homepage to everyone. It is even more interesting in the case of the homepage of news websites.

I think that in order to see the benefits of the broadcasting of data, you have to take the ISPs and service providers point of vie, not the final user's. Today, the ISP transmit every request from their users to the service provider, and the service providers answer to each user request. In the case of a dynamic web like online shops or search engines, there are no alternatives. But in the case of semi-static websites like news sites, having a system of cache synchronized at the ISP level thanks to a regular broadcast from the server can actually save a lot of bandwidth to the ISP and the service provider.
Remember the problem slashdot had with softwares like NewsTicker when it first provided a RSS feed. This is the kind of problems this wants to solve if I understand correctly.

Disclaimer : I didn't watch the one-hour long video with no transcript. Give me a text and save this bandwidth already, dammit !