aint we been here before

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Panel Gets task of closing gap between major comm protocols
{Government Computer News}, September 13, 1993, Page 3
By S. A. Marco, GCN Staff


The National Institute of Standards and Technology this week is 
expected to appoint a nine-member committee that will try to bridge 
the abyss between the TCP/IP and GOSIP worlds.


The group has until Dec 31 to come up with answeres that so far 
have eluded the federal government and the network industry.


Although the Government Open Systems Interconnection Profile 
was mandated three years ago for federal data communications 
procurements, agencies remain frustrated by the dearth and the 
high prices of GOSIP products.  In contrast, TCP/IP products 
have grown more and more popular.


But TCP/IP developers, whose most notable achievement is the 
worldwide Internet, are suffering from their own success.  By 
the year 2000, the Internet probably will not be able to handle 
any more users.  It's running out of IP addresses.  Ironically, 
the GOSIP model's Connectionless Network Protocol (CLNP) could 
offer virtually unlimited addressing capability.


It is at the network layer, where both IP (the Internet Protocol) 
and CLNP operate, that some people believe both camps can find 
a common ground.


      OSI                TCP/IP
+--------------+   +--------------+
| Application  |   |              |
+--------------+   |  Application |   A potential convergence
| Presentation |   | Presentation |
|   Session    |   |    Session   |   between the OSI and TCP/IP
+==============+   +==============+
[  Transport   ]   [      TCP     ]   stacks could result in  
===============+   +==============+
[   Network    ]   [      IP      ]   a single set of protocols 
+==============+   +==============+
|  Data Link   |   |   Data Link  |   for the network and 
+--------------+   +--------------+
|  Physical    |   |    Physical  |   Transport layers.
+--------------+   +--------------+


"The crucial thing, the real nugget in this, is not the fact 
that NIST is thinking of modifying GOSIP to accept TCP/IP," 
said Stephen Wolff, director of the National Science 
Foundation's Network Division.


"The important part is that NIST is thinking of modifying 
GOSIP to provide for the convergence of the two protocol 
stacks.  If all you do is accept TCP/IP as an alternate 
stack, then you end up with two non-communicating protocols," 
he said.


Wolff is a member of the Federal Networking Council, which
together with the Federal IRM Policy Council has submitted
a lit of candidates for the nine-member Panel on Government 
Networking Policies.


On the government side, some of the impetus for stack 
convergence is coming from the Energy Department, which 
works closely with industry, academia and researchers.


Deceptive tranquility


"We run both sets of protocols on our [Energy Sciences] 
network," said Robert Aiken, who is in charge of DOE's
network research program.  "It costs a bit of money to
support two stacks."


Aiken said users are more concerned about things like 
exchanging electronic mail and "99.99 percent don't care what 
the transport mechanisms are.  But we seem to be hung up in 
the wars underneath, at the transport and network layers."


Wolff believes the panel should focus on the network layer.
"Then you can worry about trying to converge the transport 
layer, if you want to," he said. "If you converge at the
network layer, then you can route around the world on a 
single network."


Richard des Jardins of the GOSIP Institute in Fairfax, VA., 
said the government bears a heavy responsibility for the 
TCP/IP vs. OSI conflict.


"Aspect No. 1 of this whole problem is that the government 
spent money to develop both of these suites," des Jardins said.
"Now they are both fighting each other, so the government 
should spend the money to put them together and have only one 
suite.  People don't want to have to buy a whole new network 
just because applications are from another suite."


In a white paper issued in June, des Jardins detailed the GOSIP
Institute's plan for a worldwide Internet based on protocols
borrowed from both stacks.


As a near-term solution, he proposes running TCP and its sister 
User Datagram Prtocol over OSI's CLNP - also referred to as 
"TCP and UDP with bigger addresses" or TUBA - and adopting a 
routing method called Classless Interdomain Routing (CIDR).


"TUBA provides a way for OSI interests to support TCP/IP
applications, specifically Telent and FTP" [File Transfer 
Protocol], des Jardins said in the white paper. "CIDR provides 
a way for IP addresses to last a very long time, at least 
through the end of the century."


These ideas and a handful of others currently are being debated 
by the Internet Engineering Task Force.  But the GOSIP Institute 
paper suggests that for the longer term, both the Internet and
OSI communitiies should develop a single internetwork protocol, 
which could take on the dual roles of being the next-generation
IP as well as CLNP version 2.0.


It's possible that the panel could concentrate its focus on the 
network and transport layers.  Equally possible, it could go 
further up both the TCP/IP and OSI stacks and incorporate 
application-layer TCP/IP protocols within GOSIP's fold.


Industry stress


Officials at J.G. Van Dyke & Associates, an Annapolis Junction, 
Md., company that helps agencies make GOSIP transition plans, 
said the network industry is burdened by trying to support 
two stacks at once.


"Industry is not opposed to OSI.  Industry supports TCP/IP 
because the development costs are lower," said Laura Boyer, a 
senior systems engineer for the company.  "If the two suites
were harmonized, then vendors wouldn't have to make that
choice.  They wouldn't need two product lines."


To some TCP/IP protagonists, the panel's mission already seems 
doomed.


"People who are stuck with GOSIP have my sympathy, but they 
can always jump ship," said TCP/IP guru Marshall T. Rose, a 
principal of Dover Beach Consulting, Inc., Mountain View, Calif.


Rose noted that although the government has tried to stimulate
the market for OSI products through its standards process, 
leading TCP/IP vendors such as FTP Software Inc. of Cambridge,
Mass., have not gone over to building OSI products.  FTP 
Software instead has responded by improving its TCP/IP products
and cutting prices, he said.


"Pragmatism tells us that these technologies, though
superficially related, have radically different philosophies
about networking and radically different ways of being 
standardized and produced," Rose said.


"Thinking there's some way you can harmonize them in folly,"
he said.