guru@FLORA.WUSTL.EDU (Gurudatta Parulkar) (02/05/89)
Recently, I completed a "revision" of a tech report called "Towards a Framework for High Speed Communication in a Heterogenous Networking Environment." I think it may be of interest to people on this list. If you want a copy, please send me a note, and I'll try to send it out asap. BTW, it is going to be published in the proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM'89. So you can wait until then. DISCLAIMER: One of the reviewers thought it is too early to be writing a paper based on these ideas, whereas other reviewers thought it has good ideas about the functionality expected of future internet. -guru Dr. Guru Parulkar Asst Professor guru@flora.wustl.edu Dept of Computer Science parulkar@udel.edu Washington University wucs1!guru@uunet.uu.net Campus Box 1045, Bryan 509 One Brookings Drive St. Louis MO 63130-4899 (314) 889-4621 Here is an intro to the paper. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Towards to a Framework for High Speed Communication in Heterogeneous Networking Environment Guru Parulkar Jon Turner Department of Computer Science Washington University in St. Louis In this paper we attempt to formulate a framework for high speed communication in an environment comprising a mix of subnetworks with widely varying characteristics. Recent work on high speed wide area packet switching systems is expected to lead to the development of large public networks capable of supporting applications ranging from low speed data to voice, high speed data and video. If such networks are to realize their full potential, they must be designed to operate in an environment that includes networks with widely varying characteristics. Since the early seventies, much of the work on computer communication has been directed toward the development of protocols that allow interworking among computers, operating systems and communication subnetworks of different types. These efforts have culminated in the \Arpa\ Internet Protocol Suite which has introduced a number of ideas of fundamental importance. Since the development of the internet protocols, the technological context in which we find ourselves has changed dramatically. The development of high speed \Lan s and workstations, and the growing role of supercomputers in scientific computing have led to new and largely unfulfilled requirements for high speed computer communication. These needs have been difficult to satisfy for a combination of reasons. First, existing wide-area computer networks have been unable to support the data rates required and second, the existing end-to-end protocols and host computers are unable to deliver the data to the application at those rates. On the other hand, fiber optic transmission systems are being introduced rapidly into the national communications infrastructure offering vast amounts of bandwidth at fairly modest costs. Several research groups at industrial and academic laboratories around the world have demonstrated that new high speed packet switching techniques can make these resources available in a flexible fashion, but up to now these groups have failed to consider the need to operate in a complex networking environment consisting of autonomous and/or technologically dissimilar subnetworks. We feel that it is important to recognize that this kind of heterogeneous environment is here to stay and if we are to make the best possible use of new developments in networking, we need to establish a framework that supports such diversity. In this paper we attempt to address these issues. We first provide some background on both the current internet model and high speed packet switching. We then outline the major elements of an extended internet model that allows interworking of new high speed packet networks with a wide range of other networks, including current data networks and national telephone networks. Finally, we discuss some end-to-end and host interface issues.