Fundamental design issues for the future internet

This was a very interesting paper to read. It seems that now the internet is well received, and the amount of users are growing by the day, it's hard to imagine any change in the fundamental design of internet. Most of us are used to the way things are, the TCP protocols and the IP and Ethernet designs that we often are blinded to the so called "issues" of the ethernet. This is also an interesting paper to read because for the project for this class our topic was going to be something related to real-time ethernet, or synchronous ethernet, so this was definitely a good intro paper to read.

The paper surveys the design issues of ethernet, defining the quantity V, the efficacy of the architecture, to be used to evaluate different design techniques. It evaluated the efficacy of having separate services on the internet to address different needs. Obviously the current internet architecture has no guarantee of service, delivery, order, or delay when a packet is sent through the internet. However, in the future, with bandwidth and speed both improving, more and more applications will need better services. This paper thus evaluates different design issues of incorporating the different services in one network.

One of the interesting discussions mentioned in this paper is the issue of pricing. I like to think of it also as an issue of security. If there are high priority packets that recieve better bandwidth, why doesn't everyone just use them or abuse them? Of course pricing could be an effective way of preventing regular users from accessing the high priority bandwidth. This would be used with some sort of admission control to limit the and guarantee the services of this reliable network. However, more and more security issues will start to come into play. For example, if a hacker hacks the control system that does the admission control, he could potentially flood the network with high priority packets preventing any other real-time service to be able to gain access to the link etc. This seems like a good topic to do some research on.