Reconnections: Managing Academic Networks With New Requirements

A two day workshop was held on October 25-26, 2005 in Chicago, on "a needs assessment for next-generation network cyberinfrastructure."

A number of network professionals have observed that there is a growing disconnect between traditional Internet design assumptions and evolving user and operator requirements. Some of these conclusions represent the articulate and deep understandings of the design and development community (e.g. see Ref1), identifying grand challenges that illustrate how fragile some of our most cherished architectural foundations may be.

Other assessments come from the deployment community, highlighting the inadequacy of marketplace responses to ever-increasing system complexity (see Ref2), and the operational consequences of ad hoc and incremental approaches to security and regulatory requirements (see Ref3).

Together, they point to the need for a plan on how to rethink the problem, and redesign our basic approaches to networking.

Our aim is to advance that process through this workshop. It brought together senior architects from the network design, deployment, and vendor communities to re-examine canonical Internet design assumptions in the context of dramatically different security, scalability, performance, mobility, and availability needs. The goal is a design framework for "Internet 2015", a network infrastructure that addresses the future requirements of the R&E community.

The workshop began with disruptive thoughts, considering a redesign of internetworking that is not constrained by current approaches. But from that future vision, the discussion moved towards defining a roadmap: evolutionary steps toward the new vision.

Note that this was not a workshop on technologies. It was about understanding "next-gen" requirements, and the architectural principles needed to support them. How these needs and principles will translate into technologies, and how those technologies will be put together into complex, multilayered deployments, are topics for subsequent workshops. The group did pre-work to develop a common set of assumptions/drivers from participants. Workshop outputs could include enriching and refining a requirements inventory, a gap analysis (assessing where current approaches are failing), common architectural principles, etc.

Related Links

1. Clark et al, report on the January 2005 meeting of the End-to-End Research Group, which is part of the Internet Research Task Force.
   http://www.ir.bbn.com/~craig/e2e-vision.pdf
2. Gray, T. "'Finger Pointing Tools' for Isolating Distributed System Performance Problems"
   http://staff.washington.edu/gray/papers/fpt.html
3. Gray, T. "Security in the Post-Internet Era: the Indeterminate Internet"
   http://staff.washington.edu/gray/talks/2004/netsec-09mar04.ppt
4. "Enterprise Security Architecture: A Framework and Template for Policy Driven Security"
   Network Applications Consortium, December 2004
   (Exec. Summary online, full report available for download on the site)
   http://www.netapps.org/techpubs-esaexecsumm.htm
5. "Visioning White Paper"
   Jericho Forum, February 2005
   http://www.opengroup.org/jericho/doc.tpl?CALLER=index.tpl&gdid=6809
6. Reconnections: Managing Academic Networks With New Requirements - Manageability Issues In Future Academic Networking"
   Ken Klingenstein, Director, Internet2 Middleware and Security, September 2005
   http://security.internet2.edu/docs/Internet2_Reconnections_Workshop.pdf
7. "Routing Design in Operational Networks: A Look from the Inside"
   D. Maltz, G. Xie, J. Zhan, H. Zhang, A. Greenberg, G. Hjalmtysson.
   Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM '04. August, 2004.  
   http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~4D/papers/RoutingDesignSIGCOMM04a.pdf

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