Military To Spend $42M To Build Advanced Network Control

coondoggie writes "BBN, which was bought by defense giant Raytheon today, got almost $11 million to help build self-configuring network technology that would identify traffic, let the network infrastructure prioritize it down to the end user, reallocate bandwidth between users or classes of users, and automatically make quality-of-service decisions. The advanced network technology is being developed by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and will include support for features like 32 levels of network traffic prioritization that will let data with a higher priority will be handled more expeditiously than traffic with a lower priority."

Comments

Wow

[digitalunity]

$11M to reimplement IPv6 QOS. I suppose it's a bit more advanced since it makes QOS determination based on users or groups, but that doesn't seem that difficult.

Consider me unimpressed.

Re:Wow

[elnyka]

$11M to reimplement IPv6 QOS. I suppose it's a bit more advanced since it makes QOS determination based on users or groups, but that doesn't seem that difficult.

Consider me unimpressed.

Dude, there might be strategic/tactical decisions for deciding explicitly not to use IPv6. Notice that I'm not saying that those strategic/tactical decisions are necessarily valid for long-term maintenance, extensibility or external compatibility (the later of which might even be undesirable from a strategic/tactical POV.)

The road of technical divergence can either take you to innovation or to a complete technical fiasco. That fork is many times not only dependent on technical merits alone. Besides, iirc, IPv6 QOS is still as of yet to be developed (not a criticism mind you). It supports only 7 priority levels whereas the proposed technology will support 32 levels. A typical military subnet, with stationary and mobile units, all of them plugged and receiving feeds from a bunch of disparate devices might never need more than 7 or 8, but as you start plugging those nets together, you can (and will) easily require a finer priority granularity than that.

Add to that the ability to determine priority by user or groups, and the problem cannot be dismissed as "meh, should not be that difficult." There might be other defense-specific requirements that we might not know (.ie. limiting jumbopackets by priority or origin.)

Besides, this is being researched by DARPA, the harbinger of ARPANET and MQ-Predator, not some 2009 rendition of kozmo.com.

I know that here on /. we like to fling turds at the government's white elephants, but c'mon. There must likely be be good technical/domain-specific reasons (or at least good enough) for an entity like DARPA to perform research on it, reasons beyond the ones that might impress you.

And now..

[kronosopher]

we hear the death knell of net neutrality.

The corporate think-tanks that envisioned the internet have known for a long time they had unwittingly created a network without strong authentication. This means anyone can jack-in anonymously and spread whatever socially dissident or commie/terrorist agenda they want. So in the interest of controlling our minds and the accessibility of information they are now attempting to re-implement the internet and in doing so shape traffic along arbitrary guidelines which of course will be entirely influenced by corporate profiteering.

I know that this project is only for military use, but it is only a matter of time before corporations are lured in by the promise of an unprecedented amount of power/control/oversight on their networks.

Re:Uhm

[Dan541]

The lowest bidder.