IAB Workshop on Internet Technology Adoption and Transition (itatws)

Information-centric Networking (ICN) proposes a paradigm shift in the way we create global networks. ICN introduces new network primitives which operate on named data objects, regardless on which host they reside, therefore representing a clear departure from the host-centric paradigm of the current Internet. The peer-reviewed ICN literature documents several system design advantages over host-centric networking. While ICN research is currently addressing several technical aspects that can facilitate future deployment for a range of scenarios, we also need to consider other aspects in technology adoption beyond technical superiority. In this paper we examine previous technological developments and pinpoint the economic, operational, societal, and policy-related aspects that should be paid attention to as we move forward in ICN deployment from isolated testbeds into real networks over the next decade.

This position paper discusses two related questions:
1. Using the framework of network economics, what are success factors behind the adoption of Bitcoin (a cryp- tographic curreny), and can we copy them for other protocols?
2. Can we design more successful protocols if we have in- band payment mechanisms to internalize the external- ities that emerge during adoption and in steady state?

Network protocol stacks typically follow a multi-layer hierarchical architecture. What determines the required number of layers, or the number of protocols at each layer? The space of applications, services and user expectations (at the top layer) and the space of elementary functions (at the bottom layer) are constantly evolving – how does this dynamic environment affect the organization of layered protocol stacks? What determines the evolvability of a protocol in the presence of changes? And how can we design new protocols that can effectively coexist, or even replace, older incumbents that are widely deployed?

The Internet protocol stack has a layered architecture that resem- bles an hourglass. The lower and higher layers tend to see frequent innovations, while the protocols at the waist of the hourglass appear to be “ossified”. We propose EvoArch, an abstract model for study- ing protocol stacks and their evolution. EvoArch is based on a few principles about layered network architectures and their evolution in a competitive environment where protocols acquire value based on their higher layer applications and compete with other protocols at the same layer. EvoArch produces an hourglass structure that is similar to the Internet architecture from general initial conditions and in a robust manner. It also suggests a plausible explanation why some protocols, such as TCP or IP, managed to survive much longer than most other protocols at the same layers. Furthermore, it suggests ways to design more competitive new protocols and more evolvable future Internet architectures.

With a cryptographic root-of-trust for Internet routing (RPKI [9]) on the horizon, we can finally start planning the deployment of one of the secure interdomain routing protocols proposed over a decade ago (Secure BGP [13], secure origin BGP [26]). However, if experience with IPv6 is any indicator, this will be no easy task. Security concerns alone seem unlikely to provide sufficient local incentive to drive the deployment process forward. Worse yet, the security benefits provided by the S*BGP protocols do not even kick in until a large number of ASes have deployed them.
Instead, we appeal to ISPs’ interest in increasing revenue-generating traffic. We propose a strategy that governments and industry groups can use to harness ISPs’ local business objectives and drive global S*BGP deployment. We evaluate our deployment strategy using theoretical analysis and large-scale sim- ulations on empirical data. Our results give evidence that the market dynamics created by our proposal can transition the majority of the Internet to S*BGP.

There has been significant interest on the impact of cascade effects on the diffusion of networking technology upgrades in the Internet. Thinking of the global Internet as a graph, where each node represents an economically-motivated Internet Service Provider (ISP), a key problem is to determine the smallest set of nodes that can trigger a cascade that causes every other node in the graph to adopt the protocol. We design the first approximation algorithm with a provable performance guarantee for this problem, in a model that captures the following key issue: a node’s decision to upgrade should be influenced by the decisions of the remote nodes it wishes to communicate with.

Security of the global Internet routing infrastructure is to some extent no one's concern and everyone’s concern at the same time. How can improvements be stimulated in this area - an area, where traditional market forces, the main drivers of the development of the Internet, do not work, where regulation may not be effective, where one's actions may benefit competitors more than one’s own customers?

Patents have garnered a great deal of publicity lately, both good and bad.  This paper addresses both the positive and negative aspects of patents in relation to a number of areas. Obviously, given the short length of this paper, it will only be able to scratch the surface.  After all, this is a very complicated area.  This paper will begin by discussing how patents and their purpose have been undermined through the years. The second half of the paper will discuss how patents are and remain beneficial.

The potential for both economic and technological growth offered by networked systems have attracted the attention of researchers and entrepreneurs, and allowed for convergence of ideas from various fields like computer science, economics, and operations research. As the demand for data continues to rise and new Internet protocols and technologies are invented to meet these growing needs, the role of interdisciplinary research in creating holistic analytical and experimental frameworks is becoming ever more important.

While advanced technological and biological systems have very different implementations at the molecular and component levels, they show surprising similarities in systems-level organization. In fact, Systems Biology can inform network engineering as to system-level architectural features that imbue advanced engineered systems with scalability, adaptability and evolvability. Perhaps most surprisingly, convergent evolution in both domains has produced modular architectures that are composed of elaborate hierarchies of protocols and layers of feedback regulation in response to the demand for robustness to uncertain environments. These somewhat paradoxical features are neither accidental nor artificial. Rather, they derive from a deep and necessary interplay between complexity and robustness, modularity, feedback, and fragility. This paper explores insights from both biological systems and engineering theory that can help inform the design and deployment of engineered systems such as the Internet as well as helping to describe why some technologies are difficult to evolve and deploy.

The "best effort" service model has certainly played a significant role for the success of the Internet – but in fact, the Internet only partially follows this model, and this has become a limiting factor for protocol deployment today.

Technological transition is one of the hardest questions in architectural studies. This paper examines how technological transitions take place in the Internet. In the first half of this paper, we sort out the patterns of technological transition in the networking industry, and hypothesize that diversity is requisite to cope with an “unplanned” technological transition. At the same time, however, excessive diversity would be harmful since it could cause chaos or uncontrollability. In the latter half, we measure some diversity trends of Internet Architecture, and observe a phase mismatch between layers. One can assume that such a phase mismatch helps to avoid excessive diversity as a whole, and helps the sustainability and evolvability of the Internet.

The gap between networking research communities and Internet standardization organizations (SDOs) has been growing over the years, which has drawn attention from both academic and industrial sides due to its detrimental impact. The reason behind this widening gap is complex and typically beyond the mere technology ground. In this position paper we share our perspectives toward this challenge based on our hands-on experience obtained from joint projects with universities and companies. We highlight the lessons learned, covering both success- ful and under-performed cases, and further suggest viable solutions to bridge the gap between networking research and Internet standardiza- tion, aiming to promote and maximize the outcome of such collaborative endeavours.

For the time being about 25 per cent of the .se zone file is signed using DNSSEC, a standard published as RFC 4033, RFC 4034 and RFC 4035 in March 2005. A number of our largest registrars are currently working to sign all their customer zones. All the largest ISPs in Sweden have turned on DNSSEC validation on the resolvers for their customers. A number of companies, organizations, municipalities and state agencies have turned on validation on their internal DNS. During our journey from 2005 we have ran into a number of interesting challenges and difficulties. From that we’ve learned a lot about deployment, operations and value of cooperation. This paper is pointing out some areas with remaining challenges and where we are lacking a long term strategy for the overall successful deployment of DNSSEC.

A multitude of Internet protocols are developed in the Internet Engineering Task Force to solve the challenges with the existing protocols and to fulfill the requirements of emerging application areas. However, most of them fail to achieve their goals due to limited adoption. A significant reason for non-adoption seems to be that the potential adopters’ incentives for adoption are not understood and taken into account during the protocol development. This paper addresses the problem by introducing a conceptual framework for analyzing the techno-economic feasibility of Internet protocols already during their development. The framework is based on the experiences collected during several protocol case studies and an extensive literature review. It focuses on analyzing the economic incentives of the relevant stakeholders and also takes into account the deployment environment including the competing solutions. After introducing the framework, the paper summarizes the deployment challenges and related solutions of the Multipath TCP and Host Identity Protocol cases. The suggested framework can help protocol developers to identify the potential deployment challenges of emerging protocols and thus increase the likelihood of adoption. Moreover, potential adopters can use the framework as a supporting tool for making adoption decisions.

Enabling universal Internet access is one of the key issues that is currently being addressed globally. However the existing Internet architecture is seriously “challenged” to ensure universal service provisioning. This short paper puts forth our vision to make the Internet more accessible by architecting a universal communication architectural framework combining two emerging architecture and connectivity approaches: Information Centric Networking (ICN) and Delay/Disruption Tolerant Networking (DTN). Such an unified architecture will aggressively seek to widen the connectivity options and provide flexible service models beyond what is currently pursued in the game around universal service provisioning.

Network technologies (and services) often become more valuable as more users adopt them, e.g., Metcalfe’s law. The flip side of this phenomenon is that many potentially valuable network technologies never take off, as their cost exceeds their initial value (when few are using them). This is often blamed for the slow adoption of IPv6 and security extensions to popular protocols such as DNSSEC and BGP-SEC. Developing approaches to overcome those early adoption hurdles is, therefore, of interest. Bundling technologies so as to appeal to a larger set of early adopters is a possible option, but it is hard to predict why and when it may succeed, i.e., help both technologies. Our goal is to develop principled insight and answers to this question, and in particular how it is affected by correlation in how users value each technology. The paper outlines a possible modeling approach, and points to potential differences with how correlation has traditionally been found to impact bundling’s efficacy.