Rerouting the Networks

prostoalex writes "Scientific American looks at a new approach to clearing networking jams, in research funded by the US military. Instead of using routers to route the packets from point A and point B, thus making some hop in the sequence critical for delivering the message, researchers are exploring a new approach called 'network coding.' (Here is the illustration cited in the article.)" Quoting: "[Four researchers] then at the University of Hong Kong published groundbreaking work that introduced a new approach to distributing information across shared networks. In... network coding, routers are replaced by coders, which transmit evidence about messages instead of sending the messages themselves. When receivers collect the evidence, they deduce the original information from the assembled clues. Although this method may sound counterintuitive, network coding, which is still under study, has the potential to dramatically speed up and improve the reliability of all manner of communications systems and may well spark the next revolution in the field. Investigators are, of course, also exploring additional avenues for improving efficiency; as far as we know, though, those other approaches generally extend existing methods.'"

Comments

Insecure routing why not...

[packetmon]

Firstly, this might work for P2P, DHCP, home based (l)users, but it would never be functional in a real world business network. For one, lets take into consideration security. How would this network carry IPSec tunnel information. Those packet headers need to stay in tact not come from ranDumb address. Not only that, they're introducing n+r number of failures where n = number of nodes and r = number of receivers. Secondly sequencing... Would be a nightmare. How would each node know sequencing. What happens if one fails, the sender would have to resend to ALL routers since there is no mention of a mechanism to detect which sequence went where in this topology. Finally... Anything that has to do with governments and routers leads me to remember AT&T and the NSA's taps... First of all, I don't want/need anyone managing my traffic nor would I want to configure this nightmare. It reeks worse than IS-IS + OSPF + MOSPF + MCAST combined on steroids... (My CCIE R&S/Security lab)