I disagree with the fundamental premise of this concept, that it is a PROBLEM
that the Internet is not a network. Um, last I looked, the Internet is an
interconnection of networks. Not a network in that sense.
Edge devices can today, in the scenario you portray, pick the "best" network to
connect to. Last thing we need is to ossify a method of doing that. Let the
edge be the edge and do what it wants.
On Aug 25, 2011, at 9:57 PM, Adam Novak wrote:
I trust that some of you have seen this article from a while back:
<http://moblog.wiredwings.com/archives/20110315/How-We-Killed-The-Internet-And-Nobody-Noticed.html>
An informative except:
"When I open my laptop, I see over ten different wifi access points.
Say I wanted to send data to my friend in the flat next to mine. It is
idiotic that nowadays, I would use the bottleneck subscriber line to
my upstream ISP and my crippled upload speed and push it all the way
across their infrastructure to my neighbors ISP and back to the Wifi
router in reach of mine. The Internet is not meant to be used that
way. Instead, all these wifi networks should be configured to talk to
each other."
I also trust that you are aware of what happened to the Internet in
Egypt (and elsewhere) this spring, where Internet connectivity was
disrupted by shutting down major ISP networks.
I would like to bring the attention of the IETF to what I see as a
fundamental problem with the current architecture of the Internet:
The Internet is not a network.
As part of the development of the Internet, fault-tolerant routing
protocols have been developed that allow a connecdestined fortion to
be maintained, even if the link that was carrying goes down, by
routing packets around the problem. Similarly, packets can be
load-balanced over multiple links for increased bandwidth. However,
the benefits of these technologies are not available to end users. If
I have a smartphone with both a 3G and a Wi-Fi connection, downloads
cannot currently be load-balanced across them. The two interfaces are
on two different networks, which are almost certainly part of two
different autonomous systems. Packets must be addressed to one of the
two interfaces, not the device, and packets addressed to one interface
have no way to be routed to the other. Similar problems arise when a
laptop has both a wired and a wireless connection. Wired networks also
suffer from related difficulties: If I have Verizon and my friend has
Comcast, and we string an Ethernet cable between our houses, packets
for me will still all come down my connection, and packets for my
friend will still all come down theirs.
The Internet, as it currently appears to end-users, has a logical tree
topology: computers connect to your home router, which connects to
your ISP, which connects to the rest of the Internet. Cell phones
connect to the tower, which connects through a backhaul link to the
rest of the Internet. Almost all of the devices involved have multiple
physical interfaces and full IP routing implementations, but only the
default route is ever used. This results in a brittle Internet: the
failure of one ISP router can disconnect a large number of end-users
from the Internet, as well as interrupting communication between those
users, even when those users are, physically, only a few feet from
each other.
My question is this: what IETF work would be needed to add more
routing to the edges of the Internet? If each home or mobile device
was essentially it's own autonomous system, what would this do to
routing table size? To ASN space utilization? How can individuals
interconnect home networks when RIRs do not assign address and AS
number resources to individuals? How might individuals interconnect
home networks without manual routing configuration? Under what
circumstances could an ISP trust a client's claim to have a route to
another client or to another ISP? How might packets sent to a device's
address on one network be routed to that device's address on another
network, while packets to immediately adjacent addresses take the
normal path?
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