* Introducing the Pouzin Society
A new group will meet next month to start tackling a truly herculean task: solving the Internet architecture crisis.
We’ve recently discussed the Internet’s scalability problems, as highlighted by experts. The Pouzin Society was formed to address those concerns – starting with a clean slate if necessary.
In justifying the formation of the group, it writes on its Web site:
“About 15 years ago, it became clear that IPv4 was reaching its limits, and the IETF responded by creating IPv6. In 2006 came the tacit admission that there continue to be fundamental scaling problems in the Internet routing architecture which would only be exacerbated by IPv6, and that Moore’s Law could not save us this time. Several solutions were proposed, all based on revising IPv6 addressing using the concept of a locator/identifier split. Work has proceeded diligently, but a few months ago, it became clear that not only was this approach fatally flawed, but by implication, so was IP, or any variation of it. Academic efforts, beginning with NewArch and continuing with FIND and GENI are no closer to finding a solution than we were a decade ago.”
The group showcases the book “Patterns in Network Architecture”, by John Day. According to the reviews, the book advocates a “one-layer” model that is simpler and more scalable.
The Pouzin Society also hosts a paper on its site that seems to argue along the same lines, proposing an architecture that “builds on a very basic premise, yet fresh perspective that networking is not a layered set of different functions but rather a single layer of distributed Inter-Process Communication (IPC) that repeats over different scopes. Each instance of this repeating IPC layer implements the same functions / mechanisms but policies are tuned to operate over different ranges of the performance space (e.g. capacity, delay, loss).”
The group says it named itself after Louis Pouzin, the inventor of datagrams and connectionless networking. Its first meeting will be held in conjunction with FutureNet in Boston, on May 4 and again May 6-7.
Eventually the group hopes to build implementations of its new network architecture to start testing scalability, security and other characteristics.
