A New Way to look at Networking

Google Tech Talks
August 30, 2006

Van Jacobson is a Research Fellow at PARC. Prior to that he was Chief Scientist and co-founder of Packet Design. Prior to that he was Chief Scientist at Cisco. Prior to that he was head of the Network Research group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He's been studying networking since 1969. He still hopes that someday something will start to make sense.

ABSTRACT
Today's research community congratulates itself for the success of the internet and passionately argues whether circuits or datagrams are the One True Way. Meanwhile the list of unsolved problems grows.

Security, mobility, ubiquitous computing, wireless, autonomous sensors, content...

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• networking
• tcp/ip
• internet

[TheYouSphere]

@evanplaice That's not why OSI model is not used. In the 90s TCP/IP took over because the standardization process for TCP/IP was much faster than for OSI protocols. ISO simply took too long in defining OSI and most of the people did not appreciate the length of time it took so TCP/IP took over.

[CirkusBolgen]

@ixf05u I suspect some people use disliking to eliminate videos they don't want suggested to them by YouTube.

[ixf05u]

@ixf05u NB I'm not one of those douches who makes an off the cuff witty joke disregarding the people who disliked the video. However I'm confused about who would dislike this? Why would you even be watching it in the first place?

[ixf05u]

Really great talk - he is an inspiration and a genius

[flowewritharoma]

I have had a great impression on this vid.

[videowatcherforsale]

@evanplaice - For fuck sake no one cares what you have to say! No need to type over 20 comments...

[evanplaice]

And Last. Re-write the OSI model. Nobody uses it because it doesn't accurately reflect the networking stack.

[evanplaice]

(cont) Fourth apply checksums only to the layer that they're contained. The TCP checksum breaks this rule. Every layer should be completely isolated of knowledge from each other layer. Fifth, quit putting checksums on everything; they're a waste of cycles and computationally expensive on smaller devices (like embedded platforms). If they were intended to be used for security, well, one's sum isn't exactly rocket science to apply on an injection.

[evanplaice]

(cont) Second, add version numbers to protocols. A half byte should me more than enough and it'll go a very long way to making life easier for people who write packet parsers. Third, make networking components big endian. It's staggering to consider how many man hours are wasted just addressing this dumb issue (not to mention the performance degradation to convert the data to the right format).

[evanplaice]

While I disagree with a lot of the points the speaker made it was definitely interesting talk. While I strongly wish the people writing the network specs would focus on improvements that will clear up a lot of issues with the present infrastructure. First and foremost, don't create specifications using RFCs. There are documentation repositories and community driven discussion tools available now. Use them.