Subject: [rrg] “Why The Internet Only Just Works”

From: Lixia Zhang <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2010 12:35:10 -0700

by Mark Handley,
http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/m.handley/papers/only-just-works.pdf

In preparing our meeting for Friday, I found the views in this paper  
refreshing

Lixia (no hat)

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 23 Mar 2010 18:56:26 EDT

In einer eMail vom 23.03.2010 20:35:15 Westeuropäische Normalzeit schreibt  
[email-masked]:

by Mark  Handley,

Lixia (no hat)

Lixia,
you find this view refreshing, but you nevertheless avoid questioning the  
existing routing paradigms:
You don't see or admit the primitiveness of the distance vector algorithm  
compared with Dijkstra and the capability to determine a next hop based on  
knowing the topology. 
Yes, nothing has changed during the last 20 years of BGP-based inter-domain 
 routing. I call it "progress by inzest" if TE is based on manipulating the 
 PATH length by adding the same AS more than once.
Nevertheless, I do not blame BGP, because I know that BGP could as well be  
improved as to become an inter-domain topology aware protocol. You can 
collect  millions of routes and are nevertheless in a poor shape with DV, as it  
prevents knowing a huge number of routes due to its design. That cannot be  
improved -unless you dump DV! You cannot develop an adequate congestion 
handling  mechanism if you don't know the topology! Obviously the paper you are 
referring  to complies with the view that congestion handling is a network 
layer issue and  not a transport layer issue. But the network can handle it 
only if it knows its  topology! 
The RRG is supposed to be a research group, i.e. not a group which deals  
with the next moment's need. But I do not see that the dominant people even  
react on arguments that question the existing paradigms. You cannot win the  
future with DV - period. Certainly, Dijkstra is not sufficient, too, but  
Dijkstra can be improved! Substantially improved!
However with the current attitude you won't accomplish any change for the  
better. You will go on with the most primitive TTL-mechanism ever. You will 
go  on with the phantom fear wrt loops.You will go on with the orthogonality 
between  intra- and inter-domain routing, and won't realize the advantages 
if that were  overcome.You will keep off  a whole  generation of students 
from  developing a network layer that deserves this name. Note, the current IP 
network  layer wouldn't work without ITU-T's phone networks. IETF's victory 
over ITU-T  was based on its advanced routing capabilities (imho). But 
today car  navigation outperforms the internet's routing capabilities by far 
-without  complaining about scalability problems, btw.
 
Heiner