Folks,
Feliz Año Nuevo!
One of the lessons of efforts such as IPv6 and DNSSEC should be that making
changes to the global infrastructure of the Internet is extremely difficult.
The technical details are difficult -- especially if the change seeks to work
with an existing base of functionality -- and the administration and operation
details are difficult. And the time it takes to achieve critical mass is quite
long.
However we continue to hear claims and see design efforts that are based on the
view that changing the infrastructure is easier than changing end-systems.[1]
The fact that the infrastructure is controlled by far fewer actors and
organizations makes it natural to assume that this preference is well-founded
and correct.
But does the Internet's track record substantiate this view?
So I would like to ask for folks to help the community develop some concrete
information about this, by adding entries and comments to the IETF's Outcomes Wiki:
<http://trac.tools.ietf.org/misc/outcomes/>[2]
If there is a piece of work that was targeting change to the infrastructure or
the creation of new infrastructure, please add an entry for it to the wiki.
This will provide an explicit statement about the history and degree of success
of that effort.
Congestion control, mobility, multipath, multicasting, new transport, MIME, etc.
Anything that enables higher-level capabilities.
Some infrastructure changes are designed for the router level of things and some
are designed for host-level. But they provide underlying services that can then
be used for better performance, reliability, or control or to make new
applications viable.
My expectation is that we are going to find that such efforts are difficult, no
matter where they are put, but I suspect we will find that the ones destined for
the router level of things are the hardest.
Prove me wrong by adding entries to the Outcomes wiki that show otherwise...
Or prove me correct.
Having clarity about this topic could make for a pretty good start of the new
year...
d/
[1] Serious pursuit of this topic requires some agreement about the definition
of "infrastructure" and quite possibly agreement on "end-system". For now,
let's just say that infrastructure is anything that provides services to a layer
above. That makes TCP a kind of infrastructure service. But, then, the
environment for controlling it is quite different, since it sits in hosts, not
routers. So perhaps we need some additional constructs for the "venue" of
infrastructure service?.
[2] We might discover that it will help to add a column to the wiki's tables.
That's fine to explore on the wiki's mailing list:
<https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf-outcomes>
Given footnote [1], an example of a change might be a column that notes where
the service resides in terms of Internet architecture. Granularity that
distinguishes more than just host-vs-router might be helpful, since the
Internet's range of "tussle" boundaries has grown more complex, given the
operational reality of PCs, servers, organizational nets, local ISPs and transit
nets...
In the absence of agreements to make changes, use the Comments column in the
wiki, for recording information that might warrant a new column in the table.
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net
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