Internet Info 1997 December/Internet_Info_CD-ROM_Walnut_Creek_December_1997.iso/isoc/pub/isoc_news/1-1/n-1-1-040.52a.Z/n-1-1-040.52a

Text File | 1994-03-26 | 5KB | 92 lines

N-1-1-040.52  What's Important in Coordinating Internet Activities
  Internationally
by Steven N. Goldstein* <[e-mail]>


The opportunity to write comes on the heels of the November 13-15,
1991 meetings of the Coordinating Committee for Intercontinental
Research Networking (CCIRN), generally pronounced "kern", and its
engineering advisory body, the Intercontinental Engineering Planning
Group (IEPG), in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA.  These were followed the
next week by the meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force
(IETF), including a session of its Operational Requirements Area
Directorate (ORAD), also in Santa Fe.  In addition, the Federation of
American Research Networks (FARNET) met jointly with the ORAD.  All of
these groups are concerned with a central issue: maintaining stability
in the Internet and encouraging network interconnection architectures
and engineering practices which in one way or another fit people's
views of "optimality".  I was not able to attend the IETF/ORAD or
FARNET meetings, and the minutes and business of the CCIRN and IEPG
meetings have not yet been finalized.  So, I will not attempt to
report on those events per se, but rather, I will present a general
discussion of the ideas that face us all in this arena.

I recently read an article about bulletin boards which referred to
Fidonet in terms like "chaotic, self-organizing beast", and, by
juxtaposing the Internet implied similar qualities for our collective
body.  There may be a ring of truth to that, especially by limited
analogy with fractals in Chaos Theory: LANs connect to MANs and WANs,
and, now WANs are connecting into super-WANs, and the trend may take
even higher steps of organizing.  Yet, this is being done without any
central authority.  In the U.S., many campuses have several levels of
LANs which may ultimately connect to the regional WAN.  The regional
WAN connects to the NSFNET WAN.  Some regional WANs also connect
directly to other regional WANs.  Also, portions of a campus may
connect to the ESnet or the NASA Science Internet WAN, or to the
Terrestrial Wideband Net.  And, the NSFNET, ESnet, NSI and TWB WANs
connect to each other at two Federal Internet eXchanges, FIXs.  But,
similar things are happening among commercial nets in the U.S., and
the CIX (for Commercial Internet eXchange) Association has formed
CIXs.  There have been proposals to link FIXs and CIXs into National
EXchanges (NEXs).  There is talk of one or more CIXs in Europe.
Japanese research and academic networks are talking of a JIX.  A
proposed European Backbone, Ebone, would create a supra-national
network infrastructure to which national and [intracontinental]
international European nets would connect at main nodes, again
WAN-to-super-WAN.

If one were to visualize each network as a chain link with shape
somehow indicative of topology and link thickness and size
representing network size (number of connections, traffic levels,
capacities, etc.), the result would be a three-dimensional mail
(fabric).  Some network researchers, engineers and operators assert
that the fluttering of the wings of a butterfly in some distant link
can cause huge storms throughout the net.  Less whimsically stated,
some of my colleagues maintain that the present state of Internet
technology is not up to the task of protecting the stability of their
networks from poor engineering choices in neighboring networks.  And,
as the technology catches on throughout the world, new links continue
to materialize, as do new connections among them.  New tools are being
developed to try to cope with this, especially hierarchical routing
protocols (e.g., the Border Gateway Protocol - BGP) and the ability to
interject policy into routing decisions (policy-based routing).  So,
it is a race of sorts between the proliferation of scale and
complexity and tools designed to cope with them to preserve stability
and performance.

This, then, is the context as I see it.  And the question(s), as yet
unsolved: "Can we, collectively, create a forum for exchanging
information and evaluating proposed linkages before the fact in order
to preserve stability and performance in the Internet?"  And,
relatedly, "Is it possible to have a shared sense of optimality
against which alternative solutions emanating in the forum can be
evaluated?"  Finally, "Under what sets of circumstances might we
expect individual network administrations to behave according to the
best judgments of other network administrations represented in the
forum?"

The CCIRN and the IEPG and the IETF/ORAD and FARNET did not achieve
closure on these issues this time around, and they may not do so in
the next few rounds.  Yet other bodies may have to join the forum as
the Internet becomes increasingly populated with commercial interests.
Yet, the quest must not be given up, because we all live together in
the same flat address space, and in one way or another we will share
similar fates if instabilities occur.


*Program Director, Interagency & International Networking
Coordination, Division of Networking and Communications Research &
Infrastructure, National Science Foundation.