Opposing Viewpoints - Can Both Be Right?

In this day of so much change, the many talking heads give their opinions on the state of the Internet. Recently, several industry magazines have had articles dealing with a re-thinking of traffic routing across and through the net. This is, they say, needed pretty close to immediately, because the traffic is growing at a staggering rate, with the result being the collapse of the traffic, like too many cars on an old rickety bridge.

The research into this problem is being done by the Internet Research Task Force, with the described problem being the traffic generated by the usage of emerging nations. The study is trying to find a way of scaling up to the projected need, smoothly, and with no stops along the way.

Much of the upcoming problem is growth of routing tables used by routers along the backbone of the internet. The growth of this data is straining the available memory of these routers, making upgrades to incredibly expensive hardware necessary. The Border Gateway Protocol is what is contained in the router memory, allowing the data movement smoothly from one network to the next. The method being discussed for handling increased capacity is one of divide and conquer, called multihoming. Multihoming is something that, being used at outlying points in the network can be beneficial, but causes more entries in the big tables along the backbone than are necessary.

Another benefit of the changes being proposed is the removal of networks numbering scheme to change when a business changes providers. This is like the ability of a customer to take a wireless phone number from carrier to carrier.

The IRTF Routing Research Group, existing for many years, has changed radically in the last six months to quickly adapt to the changes deemed needed.  Major vendors attending meetings of the group are Juniper, Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei (yes, the one buying 3Com), AT&T, BT, and Arbor Networks. This is pretty much a roll call of all the big players, as no one wants to miss a chance to help implement a new strategy.

The second problem being examined by the group is how the entire world will be switched smoothly to the use of IPv6. As each nation changes over to the newer standard, problems will arise as others are solved.

Two major proposals have been put forth thus far for the routing changes, one designated LISP, by Cisco, and the other by Ericsson, called Six/One. Each of the proposals has good points, and each attempts to help the upcoming transition to a truly world-wide Internet.

On the other hand, another study, done at the University of Minnesota, and called the Minnesota Internet Traffic Studies, has data showing slowed growth of internet traffic, compared to previous estimates. The growth study shows traffic is only growing at a 50-60% annual rate, both inside and outside the United States. This is far from the estimates of many that predicted as much as a doubling of traffic every 100 days.

Since the study has been completed, the growth has slowed slightly more, and the data rate predictions are apparently close to correct. The results of the MITS study show that throughput of network traffic is not being choked by the ‘pipes’ of the internet, but at the junctions where network switches take place, the ‘pipe’ is being hampered by flow restrictors.

The two studies show that while growth of information moved is not growing exponentially, the actual quantity of available information is. Also, the movement of the data through the connections is not what is being threatened with impending doom, but the routers that are bulging with the information allowing delivery of information to endpoints of the network.

Article  - Univ of Minnesota studies

Article -  net traffic problems

Article - Internet Research Task Force

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[tags] Internet Research Task Force, Minnesota Internet Traffic Studies, Cisco, routers, Ericsson, Border Gateway Protocol, multihoming, exponential growth [/tags]

Technorati Tags: Internet Research Task Force, Minnesota Internet Traffic Studies, Cisco, routers, Ericsson, Border Gateway Protocol, multihoming, exponential growth