Subject: [Coin] coinrg: request for presentation slot

From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 3 Mar 2022 23:04:40 +0100

Following up on the discussions and interim on semantic addressing,
i would like to request a slot ca. 15..20 minutes to present to COIN
some of my own insights through examples from past and ongoing work
into as Jeff put it: "(3) .. on the research that advances networking,
now that programmability and in-network compute exists at every level
in the core-edge continuum."

I primarily have four examples from my own experience/work in mind
that i could use to explain hopefully interesting network research
(and standardization) directions related to programmable forwarding planes.
Maybe we can identify from them categories of improvements
we can achieve with recent programmable forwarding planes (in case folks
in COIN are ever interested in taxonomy or other type of survey ..).

Each of these examples also has what i think is an interesting relationship
to what Adrian might call "semantic routing", but what other might call
differently, such as "forwarding instruction/parameter/program". How
we want/should call what we do in novel network packet headers is yet
another interesting topic.

Here are my four examples

[Please do not expect to understand how any of the examples work from
 the presentation. I will only explain the aspects of interest to the
 now avsailable programmable forwarding planes and benefits from that,
 if you want to understand any of those examples in itself you need to
 read the references ;-) ]

1) draft-han-6man-in-band-signaling-for-transport-qos

  The programmability view of this work is that with modern high-speed
  (100++Gbps) programmable forwarding planes and better protocol
  designs for them, we can eliminate the complex duality of 
  "stupid-high-speed-forwarding plane" and "slow programmable control
  plane CPU" that resulted in various (complex) IETF forwarding/control
  plane designs.

  In this work we designed and PoC's what i would
  call a replacement of RSVP (RFC2205) with in-band signaling through
  IP/transport-header extensions, that we would call today semantic
  routing, and process this solely in the high-speed programmable
  forwarding plane.

  In my opinion these type of approaches
  could dramatically help simply and performnace improve advanced
  services in networks such as DetNet (instead of retrofitting such
  old architectural protocol designs as RSVP for DetNet). This approach
  is IMHO a wide-open research field for COIN (aka: how do we effectively
  "in-band" control plane to improve network architectures, its not
  just an implementation issue, its also a protocol redesign issue
  to better support those high speed programmable forwarding planes).

2) https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9110431 

  This is work where we looked into even better scalability for
  similarily latency-controlled network paths by using a stateless
  approach and specifically leverage the evolving framework of
  programmable QoS in programmable forwarding planes through the 
  PIFO mechanism.

  Whereas 1) shows IMHO the best direction for
  private networks, this type of "per-flow-stateless" intelligent
  processing in a programmable forwarding plane is IMHO the
  architectural direction we do need for large-scale/public networks,
  so those specific aspects of programmability could be quite 
  important for large WANs.

  This is IMHO likewise a wide-open research field,
  both from the perspective what programmability paradigms are
  needed for better QoS (beyond demonstrated PIFO/PIEO) as well
  as from how to design better semantics for the services we want
  to achieve.

3) https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-eckert-intarea-functional-addr-internets/

  This is ongoing work showing how we IMHO must and IMHO can
  bridge the gap between the difficulties of high-speed programmable
  forwarding planes, especially wrt. address lookup/processing
  and various semantics we want, by designing appropriate address
  and processing structures so that we minimize the cost in the
  forwarding plane.

4) https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-eckert-bier-cgm2-rbs/

  This is what i think the current most advanced semantic addressing example.
  We think it solves / improves some of the fundamental challenges for
  scalability/simplicity that we have in IP Multicast BIER through the
  addressing which represents a whole (potentially engineered) delivery tree
  through a hierarchical address. The ability to actually perform the
  necessary compute to process these addresses (and change them hop-by-hop)
  does of course require advanced programmable forwarding planes, but this
  has been prototyped successfully already, and can IMHO be a good
  inspiration what is possible with todays programmable hardware.
  
So, let me know if such a review and summaires of examples vs.
programmable forwarding plaane with interesting semantic addressing
is interesting. I hope it would at least be a lot more illustrative
to talk about actual examples as opposed to generics only.

Cheers
    Toerless