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We’ve now been running packet-switched networks for many decades, and these days it’s packets and not virtual circuits lie behind most of the world’s digital communications service. But some very fundamental questions remain unanswered in this packet-switched world. Perhaps the most basic question is: “How big should a packet be?”…
AUSNOG, the Australian Network Operator’s Group meetings, have always managed to assemble a program that represents a fascinating window into the diversity of activities in the Australian communications environment. This year the program included the use of femtocells raised to a useful height by tethered drones to provide fast response…
If you look through the IANA’s IPv4 address registry you will find a set of reservations which collectively are encompasses by the address prefix 240/4, and are annotated in the registry for “Future Use.” These entries reference RFC 1112 section 4, which states: “Class E IP addresses, i.e., those with…
There was, as usual, a lot of work in the area of Inter-Domain Routing at IETF 120. There is the long-standing Inter-Domain Routing (IDR) working group, looking at the specification o0f the BGP protocol and its refinements for particular deployment scenarios such as 5G networks, or certain service quality assurance,…
The IEPG meets each Sunday at the start of the IETF week. The intended theme of these meetings is essentially one of operational relevance in some form or fashion – although the chairs will readily admit that they will run with an agenda of whatever is on offer at the…
DELEG This is a newly formed Working Group to look at the mechanisms for delegation in the DNS, intending to define a delegation with a richer set of functions than what we have with the NS delegation record. There are a number of shortcomings with the current form of delegation…
During the recent IETF meeting it was pointed out to me that we got it all wrong when we called the end-to-end transport flow control algorithms “congestion control,” as this was a term with negative connotations about the network and the quality of the user experience. If we had called…
There has been a fundamental change in the architecture of service and content delivery over the Internet over the past decade. Instead of using the network to bring the remote user to a server that delivers the content or service, the content (or service) is loaded into one or more…
The choice of UDP as the default transport for the DNS was not a completely unqualified success. On the positive side, the stateless query/response model of UDP has been a good fit to the stateless query/response model of DNS transactions between a client and a server. The use of a…
The DNS is a crucial part of today’s Internet. With the fracturing of the network’s address space as a byproduct of IPv4 address run down and the protracted IPv6 transition the Internet’s name space is now the defining attribute of the Internet that makes it one network. However, the DNS…
