From: Kevin Wampler (wampler@cs.washington.edu)
Date: Sun Nov 14 2004 - 23:00:22 PST
Likely motivated by the observation that the IP layer of the Internet is
not going change any time soon, the authors of "Internet Indirection
Infrastructure" present a versatile infrastructure based off of an overlay
network to provide various new Internet functionalities such as multicast,
anycast, and mobility.
The scheme presented in this paper employs a useful networking atomic
termed a `trigger' which adds a level of indirection between a senders and
receivers. Using this atomic (or a generalized form of it also presented
in the paper) it is possible to set up a great variety of transmission
configurations. These idea has a great deal of elegance to it, because
the atomic mechanisms it requires are very simple, yet give a great deal
of flexibility. Furthermore, the author's consider in detail some of the
more practical issues of such a protocol such as efficiency, security and
resistance to attack.
Although it seems as if the method described here has a great deal of
potential, the flexibility of the method is actually somewhat worrisome.
Although ways of thwarting some expected attacks are looked at in the
paper, before such a system were to be deployed on a larger scale I would
imagine that this would have to be examined much more carefully. There
are also some practical issued with actually deploying such a system in an
incremental manner. Although incremental employment is possible, it is
not the case that a small deployment of such a system would be useful, as
the nearest server in the overlay network could be far away, and thus
transfer times slow. One further aspect, which can be viewed both as an
advantage and as a disadvantage, is that such a system would provide great
tools for P2P file sharing programs. In particular, duplication of
packets in a multicast style transmission at the overlay servers could
greatly increase the P2P bandwidth consumption, as it would decrease the
dependence of a group of downloaders on the transmission rate of an
uploader.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.6 : Sun Nov 14 2004 - 23:00:23 PST