Folklore of Network Protocol Design (Anita Borg Lecture)
It’s natural to assume that network protocol design is a well-known science, where the designers of today’s standards take care to understand the tricks and pitfalls learned from previous protocols. This talk dispells this and other myths.
This talk describes things that should be considered when designing a protocol, such as being able to manage parameters while the network continues to operate, designing to allow graceful migration to new features, scalability, and robustness. It talks about things that might seem obvious, but everyone gets wrong, like the purpose of a “version number” in a protocol.
It talks about some of the wrong turns that have been made, such as a routing protocol (the ARPANET) that was unstable, the misconception that required inventing bridges, and how failure to put performance requirements into the standard made the bridge spanning tree algorithm unstable.
Speaker Details
Radia Perlman is a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems Laboratories. Her work has had a profound effect on the field. Her contributions to routing include invention of the spanning tree algorithm used by bridges and switches, the algorithms necessary to make link state protocols such as IS-IS and OSPF scalable and stable, the changes necessary to the IP multicast model to make it implementable, and the algorithms that would enable a routing protocol to continue to operate even if some of the trusted components are malicious. Her contributions to security include scalable and manageable PKI models, analysis and redesign of IPsec’s IKE protocol, and the ability to make data have a finite lifetime.She is the author of the textbook “Interconnections: Bridges, Routers, Switches and Internetworking Protocols”, and co-author of “Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World”. She has about 70 issued patents in the fields of routing and security. She is a series editor for Prentice Hall. Radia Perlman has a PhD in computer science from MIT and an honorary doctorate from KTH.
- Date:
- Speakers:
- Radia Perlman
- Affiliation:
- Sun Microsystems Laboratories
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Jeff Running
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