A New Way of Looking at Networking – Video of Van Jacobson

In this video, Van Jacobson discusses the evolution of networking and suggests a good future direction for it. He says that there are three eras of networking: telephony, digital routing, and digital content labeling. The third era is direction that he thinks networking should be heading.

In the first era of telephony, the telephone number describes a circuit (pipeline) that should be connected between two callers.

In the second era of digital packaging, the information that is being sent between two locations is broken up into packets when it is sent and put back together when it is received. The advantage of digital packaging is that instead of having “long trains” of information traveling across pipelines and having to wait for crossing “trains,” there are now just short “little cars” of information traveling along the pipelines. This results in much less congestion.

In the third era of digital content labeling, content packets will be broadcast from a starting point in the same way that radio waves are broadcast from a radio station. People searching for that content will be able to locate it in the same way that we can search for a radio station. The advantage of this new approach is that there would be no duplication of content and that it is built on a broadcast model rather than on a model of two people communicating.

Here is the video. (Note: Click on the heading if you would like to view the video in a new window so that you can enlarge it to fill the screen.)

A New Way of Looking at Networking

1 hr 21 min – Aug 30, 2006

Google Tech Talks August 30, 2006

Van Jacobson is a Research Fellow at PARC. Prior to that he was Chief Scientist and co-founder of … all » Packet Design. Prior to that he was Chief Scientist at Cisco. Prior to that he was head of the Network Research group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He’s been studying networking since 1969. He still hopes that someday something will start to make sense.

ABSTRACT Today’s research community congratulates itself for the success of the internet and passionately argues whether circuits or datagrams are the One True Way. Meanwhile the list of unsolved problems grows.

Security, mobility, ubiquitous computing, wireless, autonomous sensors, content distribution, digital divide, third world infrastructure, etc., are all poorly served by what’s available from either the research community or the marketplace. I’ll use various strained analogies and contrived examples to argue that network research is moribund because the only thing it knows how to do is fill in the details of a conversation between two applications. Today as in the 60s problems go unsolved due to our tunnel vision and not because of their intrinsic difficulty. And now, like then, simply changing our point of view may make many hard things easy.