Papers about Research Questions for the Internet

Topics so far: DNS, Evolution and Deployment, Measurement, Mobility, Modeling, Multicast, Network Management, Pricing, QoS, Routing, Security, Transport, Web Caching and CDNs, IP over Optical, Other, Organizational, Historical.

DNS:

• John C. Klensin, Role of the Domain Name System, draft-klensin-dns-role-01.txt, 2001, internet-draft, work in progress.
  "The original function and purpose of the DNS is reviewed, and contrasted with some of the functions into which it is being forced today and some of the newer demands being placed upon it or suggested for it... This document [is] ... a strong suggestion that the time has come to begin thinking more broadly about the problems we are encountering and possible approaches to solving them."

• Ed Lewis, Notes from the State-Of-The-Technology: DNSSEC, draft-lewis-state-of-dnssec-02.txt, April 2001, internet-draft, work in progress.
  "The current collective wisdom is that DNSSEC is 1) important, 2) a buzzword, 3) hard, 4) immature. To capture the true state of the technology and identify where work is needed, an informal gathering of groups known to be involved in DNSSEC was held in conjunction with the 49th IETF."

• Zita Wenzel and James Seng, Requirements of Internationalized Domain Names, draft-ietf-idn-requirements-08.txt, 2001, internet-draft, work in progress. Expired?
  "This document describes the requirement for encoding international characters into DNS names and records... This document assumes that the most effective solution involves putting non-ASCII names inside some parts of the overall DNS system."

Evolution and Deployment:

• Christophe Diot et al., Deployment Issues for the IP Multicast Service and Architecture, IEEE Network, January 2000.
  "We examine the issues that have limited the commercial deployment of IP-multicast from the viewpoint of carriers. We analyze where the model fails, what it does not offer, and we discuss requirements for successful deployment of multicast services."

• David Reed, The End of the End-to-End Argument, April 2000.
  "I would argue that we need more than ever to understand [the end-to-end argument] and to apply it as we evolve the network... Future potential is hard to visualize, but our inability to make out the details should not justify locking the doors against new ways to use the network."

Measurement:

• Sally Floyd: Questions.
  "If anyone has (partial) answers to any of these questions, I would be very interested."

Mobility:

• H. Chaskar, Requirements of a QoS Solution for Mobile IP.
  draft-ietf-mobileip-qos-requirements-02.txt, internet draft, work in progress, 2002.
  "This document describes requirements for an IP QoS mechanism for its satisfactory operation with Mobile IP."

• P. Roberts, Local Subnet Mobility Problem Statement, draft-proberts-local-subnet-mobility-problem-02.txt, 2001, internet draft, work in progress.
  "This draft represents a problem statement to enable investigation of how a local subnet mobility routing protocol can be employed to enable mobility and fast network recovery."

Modeling:

• Sally Floyd and Vern Paxson, Difficulties in Simulating the Internet (postscript, PDF).
  February, 2001. To appear in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking.
  "Modeling and simulating the Internet is not an easy task. The goal of this paper is to discuss some of the issues and difficulties in modeling Internet traffic, topologies, and protocols."

Multicast:

• Christophe Diot et al, Multipoint Communication: A Survey of Protocols, Functions and Mechanisms, IEEE JSAC, April 1997.
  "For each topic... we describe the state of the art and we present the areas of current active reserach."

• Ian Brown, Jon Crowcroft, Mark Handley, and Brad Cain, Internet Multicast Tomorrow, The Internet Protocol Journal (IPJ), December 2002.
  "We have looked at some of the newer ideas in the research and development community in the area of multicast."

Network Management:

• The Network Management Research Group.
  "The Network Management Research Group (NMRG) provides a forum for researchers to explore new technologies for the management of the Internet."

Pricing:

• S. Shenker, D. Clark, D. Estrin, S. Herzog, Pricing in Computer Networks: Reshaping the Research Agenda, Communications Policy. Vol. 20(1), 1996.
  "The more academic literature has largely focused on devising optimal pricing policies; achieving optimal welfare requires charging marginal congestion costs for usage. In this paper we critique this optimality paradigm ... we contend that the research agenda on pricing in computer networks should shift away from the optimality paradigm and focus more on structural and architectural issues."

• Richard Gibbens' web page on Pricing Internet Resources.
  (Last modified in 1998...)

QoS:

• G. Huston, Next Steps for the IP QoS Architecture, RFC 2990, November 2000.
  "This document highlights the outstanding architectural issues relating to the deployment and use of QoS mechanisms within internet networks"

Routing:

Security:

• A. Chakrabarti and B. Manimaran, Internet Infrastructure Security: A Taxonomy, IEEE Network, November/December 2002.
  "There is a compelling need to develop architectures, algorithms, and protocols to realize a dependable Internet infrastructure... The first and foremost step is to develop a compresive understanding of the security threats and existing solutions."

• Thomas Hardjono et al., Secure IP Multicast: Problem areas, Framework, and Building Blocks, draft-irtf-smug-framework-01.txt, September 2000, internet-draft, work in progress. Expired?
  "This document provides a foundation for the research work done as the Secure Multicast Group (SMuG)of the IRTF."

Transport and Congestion Control Issues:

• B. Braden et al., Recommendations on Queue Management and Congestion Avoidance in the Internet, RFC 2309, April 1998.
  "This memo presents two recommendations to the Internet community... It ... urges a concerted effort of research, measurement, and ultimate deployment of router mechanisms to protect the Internet from flows that are not sufficiently responsive to congestion notification."

• Control of traffic from flash crowds and Denial of Service attacks.

• TCP:
  • M. Allman et al., Ongoing TCP Research Related to Satellites, RFC 2760, February 2000.
    "The goal of this document is to educate researchers as to the current work and progress being done in TCP research related to satellite networks... The research community is encouraged to examine the above mitigations in an effort to determine which are safe for use in shared networks such as the Internet."

• New transport protocols and congestion control mechanisms:
  • Reliable Multicast Research Group.
    "The RMRG purpose is collectively to solve some hard problems about reliable multicast transport protocols."
  • New congestion control mechanisms for unicast traffic.

Web Caching, Content Distribution, and Middleboxes:

• B. Carpenter et al., Middleboxes: Taxonomy and Issues, RFC 3234, Informational, February 2002.
  "The principle goal of this document is to describe and analyse the current impact of middleboxes on the architecture of the Internet and its applications... Goals that might follow on from this work are ... to identify additional work that should be done in the IETF and IRTF."

IP over Optical:

Other:

• Networking Issues of Grid Infrastructures, Grid High Performance Networking Research Group, June 2003.
  "Two specific goals of the GHPN-RG are identifying:
  (1) grid application requirements and implementations that are not supported or understood by the networking community and:
  (2) advanced networking features that are not being utilized by grid applications."

• Looking Over the Fence at Networks: A Neighbor's View of Networking Research (2001).
  CSTB Annual Convening on Research Horizons, January 2001.
  Box 4.1: "The items that follow ... were identified as interesting questions worthy of further consideration and perhaps useful directions for future networking research." The items include questions of modularity by protocol layering, topological regions, or administrative domains; successors to the end-to-end model; fault isolation; content-based addressing; management, signalling, and control; making topological information available to higher layers; alternatives to cooperative congestion control; addressing economic incentives as well as technical constraints; middleware; and using overlays to deploy disruptive technologies.

• Sally Floyd, Internet Research: Comments on Formulating the Problem (postscript, pdf), January 1998.
  "The goal of this note is to further the discussion of implicit and explicit assumptions in network research."

• David D. Clark and Marjory S. Blumenthal, Rethinking the design of the Internet: The end to end arguments vs. the brave new world, August 2000.
  "This paper looks at the Internet and the changing set of requirements for the Internet that are emerging as it becomes more commercial, more oriented towards the consumer, and used for a wider set of purposes... We argue that the open, general nature of the Net, which derived from the end to end arguments, is a valuable characteristic that encourages innovation, and this flexibility should be preserved."
  This paper contains sections on "Design issues in adding mechanism to the core of the network" and on "Labels on information". While this paper does not specifically outline open research questions, it lays out the future context and new forces affecting the development of the Internet.

Organizational:

Historical:

• L. Kleinrock, Research Areas in Computer Communication, CCR, July 1974 (reprinted in CCR's 1995 25th anniversary issue).

• D. Clark et al., Towards the Future Internet Architecture, RFC 1287, December 1991.
  "This informational RFC discusses important directions for possible future evolution of the Internet architecture, and suggests steps towards the desired goals."

• Workshop on Research Directions for the Next Generation Internet, May 13-14, 1997. White Papers.
  

My own opinion would be that there is extraordinary power in the rough and discontinuous evolution of the current infrastructure. With an evolutionary approach, changes can happen not only top-down from above, as decreed by funding sources, but can also happen bottom-up, by enabling changes that are complementary to the current forces, and that help to harness and focus the energies of a vast, distributed, decentralized community and infrastructure.