The Internet: An Exciting Time

1. The Internet: An Exciting Time One of the most influential inventions • A research experiment that escaped from the lab • … to be a (the?) global communications infrastructure Ever wider reach • Today: 2 billion users • Tomorrow: more users, computers, sensors, content Constant innovation • Apps: Web, P2P, social networks, virtual worlds • Links: optics, WiFi, cellular, ...

2. Transforming Everything The ways we do business • E-commerce, advertising, cloud computing, ... The way we have relationships • E-mail, IM, Facebook friends, virtual worlds How we think about law • Interstate commerce? National boundaries? Wikileaks? The way we govern • E-voting and E-government • Censorship and wiretapping The way we fight • Cyber-attacks, including nation-state attacks

3. But what is networking?

4. A Plethora of Protocol Acronyms? WAP SNMP IPX SIP PPP MAC FTP LLDP UDP HIP ICMP OSPF RTP IMAP IGMP BGP HTTP ECN PIM RED ARP IP TCP RIP MPLS RTCP SMTP BFD CIDR RTSP NNTP TLS NAT SACK STUN SSH DNS DHCP VTP VLAN LDP POP LISP TFTP

5. A Heap of Header Formats?

6. TCP/IP Header Formats in Lego

7. A Big Bunch of Boxes? Load balancer Label Switched Router Switch Router Scrubber Repeater Gateway Bridge Intrusion Detection System Route Reflector Deep Packet Inspection DHCP server Packet shaper Firewall NAT Hub Packet sniffer DNS server WAN accelerator Base station Proxy

8. An Application Domain?

9. Application Domain for Theory? • Algorithms and data structures • Control theory • Queuing theory • Optimization theory • Game theory and mechanism design • Formal methods • Information theory • Cryptography • Programming languages • Graph theory

10. Application Domain for Systems? Distributed systems Operating systems Computer architecture Software engineering …

11. What Peers in Other Fields Say Is networking a problem domain or a scholarly discipline? “What are the top ten classic problems in networking?  I would like to solve one of them and submit a paper to SIGCOMM.” After hearing that we don't have such a list: "Then how do you consider networking a discipline?” “So, these networking research people today aren't doing theory, and yet they aren't the people who brought us the Internet.  What exactly are they doing?” “Networking papers are strange.  They have a lot of text.”

12. “There is a tendency in our field to believe that everything we currently use is a paragon of engineering, rather than a snapshot of our understanding at the time.  We build great myths of spin about how what we have done is the only way to do it to the point that our universities now teach the flaws to students (and professors and textbook authors) who don't know better.” -- John Day (Internet pioneer)

13. Before you all leave …

14. So, Why is Networking Cool? Relevant • Can measure/build things • Can impact the real world Interdisciplinary • Well-motivated problems + rigorous solution techniques • Interplay with policy and economics Widely-read papers • Many of the most cited papers in CS are in networking • Congestion control, distributed hash tables, resource reservation, self-similar traffic, multimedia protocols,… • Three of top-ten CS authors (Shenker, Jacobson, Floyd)

15. Ecosystem Interest from providers/data center operators Vendors Deployments in R&E Networks Commitment varies

16. Architectural questions tend to dominate CS networking research

17. UDP TCP Today’s Divisions of Labor network Applications Data Link Physical End host and the network • Packet switching • Best-effort delivery • Fixed end-points withIP addresses Protocol layers • IP as the center of the universe • IP above the link layer • IP below transport and application

18. Beyond Today’s Division of Labor

19. Software Router + Multi-Port NIC PC

20. Custom Hardware Difficult to develop, always behind industry Difficult to program, constrained environment Too expensive

21. Between Hosts and the Network data centers . . . . servers Internet clients Networked services hosted in data centers • Web sites, social networks, video streaming, online gaming, virtual worlds, ... • Replicated on servers in multiple data centers • Churn from mobile users, migrating VMs, failures, … Time to rethink • Naming and addressing • Server and networkload balancing • Energy usage • End-host network stackand socket API

22. App App App App App App App App App App App Specialized Applications Windows (OS) Linux Mac OS Specialized Operating System or or Open Interface Open Interface Specialized Hardware Microprocessor Horizontal Open interfaces Rapid innovation Huge industry Vertically integrated Closed, proprietary Slow innovation Small industry

23. App App App App App App App App App App App Specialized Features Control Plane Control Plane Control Plane or or Specialized Control Plane Open Interface Open Interface Specialized Hardware Merchant Switching Chips Horizontal Open interfaces Rapid innovation Vertically integrated Closed, proprietary Slow innovation

24. Software Defined Network (SDN) Control Programs Control Programs Control Programs Abstract Network View Network Virtualization Global Network View Network OS Packet Forwarding Packet Forwarding Packet Forwarding Packet Forwarding Packet Forwarding

25. Broader interest in an evolvable Internet

26. Cellular industry Recently made transition to IP Billions of mobile users Need to securely extract payments and hold users accountable IP sucks at both, yet hard to change

27. Telco Operators Global IP traffic growing 40-50% per year End-customer monthly bill remains unchanged Therefore, CAPEX and OPEX need to reduce 40-50% per Gb/s per year But in practice, reduces by ~20% per year

28. Scott Shenker at 1st ONS in 2011 “The Future of Networking and the Past of Protocols”