Mills@UDEL.EDU (10/04/87)
Folks, The Internet Architecture Task Force (INARC) studies technical issues in the evolution of the Internet from its present architectural model to new models appropriate for very large, very fast internets of the future. It is organized as a recurring workshop where researchers, designers and implementors can discuss novel ideas and experiences without limitation to the architecture and engineering of the present Internet. The output of this effort represents advance planning for a next-generation internet, as well as fresh insights into the problems of the current one. The INARC is planning a two-day retreat/workshop for 17-18 November at BBN to discuss a fresh start on advanced internet concepts and issues. The agenda for this meeting will be to explore architecture and engineering issues in the design of a next-generation internet system. The format will consist of invited presentations on selected topics followed by a general discussion on related issues. Written contributions of suitable format and content will be submitted for publication in the ACM Computer Communication Review. In order to have the most stimulating discussion possible, the INARC is expanding the list of invitees to include those researchers with agenda to plow, axe to grind, sword to wield or any other useful instrument for that matter. Contributors are invited to submit concise summaries of presentations of from fifteen to forty minutes in electronic form to mills@udel.edu or in hardcopy form to Dr. David L. Mills Electrical Engineering Department University of Delaware Newark, DE 19716 (302) 451-8247 Up to forty participants will be selected on the basis of quality, relevance and interest. Following is a list of possible areas and issues of interest to the community. Readers are invited to submit additions, deletions and amendments. 1. How should the next-generation internet be structured, as a network of internets, an internet of internets or both or neither? Do we need a hierarchy of internets? Can/must the present Internet become a component of this hierarchy? 2. What routing paradigms will be appropriate for the new internet? Will the use of thinly populated routing agents be preferred over pervasive routing data distribution? Can innovative object-oriented source routing mechanisms help in reducing the impact of huge, rapidly changing data bases? 3. Can we get a handle on the issues involved in policy-based routing? Can a set of standard route restrictions (socioecononic, technopolitic or bogonmetric) be developed at reasonable cost that fit an acceptable administrational framework (with help from the Autonomous Networks Task Force)? How can we rationalize these issues with network control and access-control issues? 4. How do we handle the expected profusion of routing data? Should it be hierarchical or flat? Should it be partitioned on the basis of use, service or administrative organization? Can it be made very dynamic, at least for some fraction of clients, to support mobile hosts? Can it be made very robust in the face of hackers, earthquakes and martians? 5. Should we make a new effort to erase intrinsic route-binding in the existing addressing mechanism of the Internet IP address and ISO NSAP address? Can we evolve extrinsic binding mechanisms that are fast enough, cheap enough and large enough to be useful on an internet basis? 6. Must constraints on the size and speed of the next-generation internet be imposed? What assumptions scale on the delay, bandwidth and cost of the network components (networks and gateways) and what assumptions do not? 7. What kind of techniques will be necessary to accellerate reliable transport service from present speeds in the low megabit range to speeds in the FDDI range (low hundreds of megabits)? Can present checksum, window and backward-correction (ARQ) schemes be evolved for this service, or should we shift emphasis to forward-correction (FEC) and streaming schemes. 8. What will the internet switch architecture be like? Where will the performance bottlenecks likely be? What constraints on physical, link and network-layer protocols will be advisable in order to support the fastest speeds? Is it possible to build a range of switches running from low-cost, low-performance to high-cost, high-performance? 9. What form should a comprehensive congestion-control mechanism take? Should it be based on explicit or implicit resource binding? Should it be global in scope? Should it operate on flows, volumes or some other traffic characteristic? 10. Do we understand the technical issues involved with service-oriented routing, such as schedule-to-deadline, multiple access/multiple destination, delay/throughput reservation and resource binding? How can these issues be coupled with effective congestion-control mechanisms? 11. What will be the relative importance of delay-based versus flow-based service specifications to the client population? How will this affect the architecture and design? Can the design be made flexible enough to provide a range of services at acceptable cost? If so, can the internet operation setpoint be varied, automatically or manually, to adapt to different regimes quickly and with acceptable thrashing? 12. What should the next-generation internet header look like? Should it have a variable-length format or fixed-length format? How should options, fragmentation and lifetime be structured? Should source routing or encapsulation be an intrinsic or derived feature of the architecture? 13. What advice can we give to other task forces on the impact of the next-generation internet in their areas of study? What research agenda, if any, should we propose to the various NSF, DARPA and other agencies? What advice can we give these agencies on the importance, level of effort and probablity of success of the agenda to their current missions? David L. Mills, Chairman INARC