more on A return to the Intelligent Network

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Karl Auerbach <karl () cavebear com>
Date: December 4, 2005 3:34:37 PM EST
To: DV Henkel-Wallace <gumby () henkel-wallace org>, David Farber  
<dave () farber net>
Subject: Re: [IP] A return to the Intelligent Network
Reply-To: Karl Auerbach <karl () cavebear com>


A while back I was one of the principal researchers on what we called  
"smart" networking.  This was DARPA/University of California stuff,  
so what we intended was not wrapped in layers of proprietary  
restrictions. It was quite unlike what the article describes.

I never got very far for non-technical reason that this was done  
during the time I was on the ICANN board of directors - a job that  
took 60+ hours a week, not leaving enough live brain cells to do this  
research work.

What we were doing was trying to retain the basic idea of  
connectionless routing of packets but adding some hooks into the  
control plane.

We started with a modelling system, or rather a set of such systems.  
These models were intended to have knowledge of the network topology  
and other kinds of resources and constraints.

The primary input to the models would be "service level agreements",  
which was somewhat of a misnomer because these would not be the heavy  
things that we think of as SLAs, but could be things as simple as  
someone picking up a VOIP phone and placing a call or requesting an  
on-demand movie over the net.

The models would crank and produce a provisioning regime - what this  
was could be and MPLS path (and perhaps a backup path) or into a goal- 
directed mechanism in the routers.  Rather than tweeking a bunch of  
queing parameters the goal-directed mechanisms would be given goals  
and constraints; the routers would be allowed to self-adapt.  (The  
goal-direction was not in the fast path; I was hoping to use a JVM in  
the routers for the computation environment; were I do do it today  
I'd probably go for Python.)

If the router couldn't meet the goals it would generate an exception  
back to the modeling system.  If the models couldn't account for the  
inability to reach the goals then the exception would propagate to a  
troubleshooting engine (which was really my favorite part as I've  
always been interested in tools and methods to make our networks more  
readily repairable. [My grandfather was a radio repairman; my father  
a TV repairman; so I have a lot of sympathy for folks who have to fix  
broken electronic systems.])

These mechanisms did not embed application smarts into the network;  
they worked on flows.  In IPv4 this means dealing with source/ 
destination addresses and ports and the QoS bits.  In IPv6 we have  
the additional flow identifiers.

As I said, my ICANN role kinda derailed my role in this.

I however, *have* worked, around 1994, on the idea of application- 
layer routers.  I called the idea "content routing" and I'd have to  
scrounge deep into my ancient notes to get the details, but the  
general idea was to reposition internet "content" - which turned to  
to be what companies like Akamai did - but also to move it around  
using chunks of content as if they were giant packets (not at the IP  
layer of course) much like we did at Interactive Systems in the  
1970's, or how Sendmail forwards (and relays) mail, or IBM's old  
SNADS did it.

By-the-way, out of all of these things I have come strongly to  
believe that the internet is in need of a "session" layer on top of  
TCP.  We really ought to revive the old OSI session layer, strip out  
all the nonesense and cruft, and create a simple way to mark streams  
with "resume" points. (Protocol engines need not retain stream  
state.)  This would greatly simplify mobility and content transfers.

                --karl--



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