[Infowarrior] - Routing Economics Threaten the Internet

[Richard Forno]

Routing Economics Threaten the Internet
Written by Lawrence G. Roberts
10/25/2007

http://tinyurl.com/2q2xbx

The Internet has some major problems. The big one involves the cost of
supporting the amount of content and services being supplied over the
Internet infrastructure. And if it's not fixed soon, the expansion of
Internet traffic could outrun our ability to pay for it.

Here's why: Since it started, traffic on the Internet has about doubled
every year. Remarkably, the router technology that we started with
(best-effort packet routing) has supported this huge growth without any
basic change except speed improvements resulting from the improvement in
semiconductors.

Due to the improvements in fiber technology, the cost of increasing raw
bandwidth capacity has been decreasing about as fast as the traffic grows.
Fiber, therefore, is no longer the problem. But now that fiber technology
has advanced, we have a different problem: routing technology. Internet
traffic is now growing much more quickly than the rate at which router cost
is decreasing per bit. Traffic is doubling each year, while routers follow
the semiconductor trend, dropping in cost per bit by one half every 18
months.

The cost of Internet capacity would therefore double every three years
without some key new innovation. The economy could not support this for very
long.

Traditional routed IP networks provide reasonable quality by operating with
huge overcapacity so the peak usage hardly ever overloads the routers. If a
packet router becomes overloaded it seriously damages all the traffic, data,
voice, and video. If we don't find a way to keep up with these increasing
capacity costs, we'll start to see this damage.

I believe that the solution is flow routing. [Ed. note: Dr. Lawrence Roberts
is the founder and CEO of Anagran Inc., a flow-based routing company.] Flow
routing has introduced an important innovation that can help alleviate the
capacity crunch: Routers do not need to route every packet, only the first
packet in a flow. Thus, the inherent cost of these new routers is one third
that of packet routers, and they provide an immediate 3:1 capacity increase
when they are inserted into the network, eliminating the need to add
capacity and cost for a year or two.

Flow router technology can be included at the access point where the
overload may occur so that congestion and overload does not damage the
traffic; lower priority, large file transfers are throttled back; and
interactive voice and video stays protected. This allows the entire network
to operate at much higher efficiency, often around 90 percent utilization
day and night.

As the technology is further employed, the step function saving is on the
order of 9:1 (cost and efficiency). This could extend the time that Internet
traffic can continue to double at the current network cost by nine years. At
that point, some additional innovation will be needed to keep cost under
control or traffic growth will have to slow down.

The Internet's problems are not limited to cost, however. The aging IP
technology in the installed base has other challenges.

Quality: Today, video can be easily downloaded just like data, but streaming
video only works well if the network has enough overcapacity, with data
users kept on a separate network. In many cases (like WiFi, for example),
the same is true for voice. We can¹t even start to consider many other
applications like ³telesurgery² -- robotic surgery performed remotely via
the Internet -- due to poor video quality as a result of packet loss and
delay variance.

There are really two problems to solve here: controlling the huge network
load caused by video downloading, and the inherent inability of the current
packet router design to support low delay variance, with low-loss streaming
media mixed with lots of data traffic. Flow routing could solve both these
problems. Based on observing and remembering the state of each ongoing data
stream (flow), the router can protect video, voice, and any real-time stream
from delay variance and loss.

Security: Security is becoming a serious problem. Although it is partly a
computer issue, in large part it is also a network issue, since current
networking technologies do not verify who is sending the data. Most known
security problems (denial of service, spam, viruses) would be much easier to
cope with if the network included three additional functions: authorizing
users as they connect to the network; checking the addresses a user claims
to be sending from, to insure it is not faked; and detecting traffic
anomalies such as denial-of-service attacks.
Authorization is a known technology, but not very useful without source
address verification. Source address verification is expensive if required
for every packet, but with the advent of flow routing, it can be done once
per flow, making it extremely inexpensive. Similarly, detecting traffic
anomalies is virtually impossible at the packet level, but quite reasonable
with flow routing technology, by simply looking at the flow information.

Thus, with the changes happening in routing technology, we should be able to
pinpoint and identify anyone who sends spam or attacks a remote computer,
and at least recognize and stop denial-of-service attacks, if not identify
the originator. Once security attacks are traceable, law enforcement becomes
possible.

Currently, we are expecting the same 40-year-old technology to support not
only information exchange like Web browsing and email, but all our real-time
traffic such as voice and video. Three basic problems must be overcome to
accomplish this: quality, security, and economics. We need to improve packet
forwarding design if we are going to fix these problems.

‹ Dr. Lawrence G. Roberts, CEO, Anagran Inc.