MOBILE MULTIMEDIA LABORATORY

Athens University of Economics and Business

Department of Informatics

Information Centric Networking

PhD Course Sponsored by Euro-NF
14-18 May 2012, Athens - Greece

Problems, Issues, and Limitations

of the Current Internet

Prof. George C. Polyzos

polyzos@aueb.gr
http://MM.AUEB.GR/

14/05/2012

Internet Problems & Limitations

polyzos@aueb.gr

The Internet:
Problems, Issues, and Limitations
Lecture Outline
Architectural Origins of the Internet
Evolution of Internet Size, User Needs and Requirements
Limitations of the Current Internet in detail

14/05/2012

Mobility, Wireless Terminals and Devices with Limited Resources

Problems in Security and Trust
Routing scalability
Content distribution
Management and Control
Quality of Service provision
Congestion Control

Internet Problems & Limitations

polyzos@aueb.gr

Architectural Origins of the

InternetARPAnet History

ARPANET the ancestor of the Internet.

The first ARPANET link was established between the University of California, Los
Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) at 22:30 on October 29, 1969

Leonard Kleinrock: "We set up a telephone connection between us and the guys at
SRI...We typed the L and we asked on the phone,

"Do you see the L?"

"Yes, we see the L," came the response.
We typed the O, and we asked, "Do you see the O."
"Yes, we see the O."
Then we typed the G, and the system crashed ...

Yet a revolution had begun" ...

Lawrence G. Roberts: "The goal of the computer network is for each computer to
make every local resource available to any computer in the net in such a way that
any program available to local users can be used remotely without degradation."

14/05/2012

Internet Problems & Limitations

polyzos@aueb.gr

ARPAnet & Internet History

The ARPANET map by February
1982
ARPANET was about time-sharing.
Time sharing tried to make it
possible for research institutions
to use the processing power of
other institutions computers
when they had large calculations
to do that required more power,
or when someone else's facility
might do the job better
TCP/IP became officially THE
protocol for ARPANET on January
1st 1983.
14/05/2012

Internet Problems & Limitations

polyzos@aueb.gr

Architectural
Origins of the Internet
With TCP/IP the role of the network is
reduced to the minimum, pushing all
the intelligence to end hosts
TCP/IP became the glue for unifying
heterogeneous networks
Successful due to the underlying
hourglass model where the networking
layer forms the thin waist of the
hourglass
Transparency
Simplicity
Image src: http://derivadow.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/hourglass.jpg

14/05/2012

Internet Problems & Limitations

polyzos@aueb.gr

Evolution of Internet Size

With TCP/IP and the introduction of WWW, Internet growth
was tremendous

14/05/2012

Internet Problems & Limitations

polyzos@aueb.gr

Evolution of Internet Traffic

and Applications
Internet Traffic Evolution
(source: Cisco Visual Networking Index 2010-2015)
Consummer Internet Traffic, 2010-2015
2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

Increase
2010-5

12,355

17,467

23,618

31,318

40,842

53,282

34%

174

399

858

1,654

2,930

4,931

95%

By Network (PB per Month)

Fixed
Mobile

By Subsegment (PB per Month)

File sharing

4,968

6,017

7,277

8,867

11,040

13,797

23%

Internet video

4,672

8,079

12,146

17,583

24,357

33,620

48%

Web, email, and data

2,393

3,113

4,146

5,325

6,769

8,592

29%

308

442

659

905

1,251

1,736

41%

49

68

95

133

187

290

43%

138

147

153

157

160

168

4%

11

132%

Video calling
Online gaming
Voice over IP (VoIP)
Other

14/05/2012

Internet Problems & Limitations

polyzos@aueb.gr

Evolution of User Needs

and Requirements
New needs emerged, leading to new requirements
Anywhere, Anytime Access -> Mobility Support
Financial Transactions -> Security & Privacy
Multimedia Applications -> Quality of Service Support, Efficient
Content Delivery (e.g. multicasting)
Fast increase in Number of Users and interconnected networks ->
Routing Scalability, Congestion Control, Network Management

The Internet was simply not designed to meet those needs

A vicious cycle of patching began to meet new requirements
Complexity gradually increased
but met with resistance in adoption
Ossification of the architecture
14/05/2012

Internet Problems & Limitations

polyzos@aueb.gr

Wireless Communications, Mobility,

and Devices with Limited Resources
Internet addressing was designed with fixed hosts in mind
Forecasts show that traffic from mobile devices will increase dramatically
Mobile IP is problematic/inefficient
Triangular Routing
Traffic does not follow optimal path
Breaks BGP routing policies

Handoff delays
Tunneling confuses certain applications

TCP assumes (all) losses are due to congestion

on wireless links losses are mainly due to bit errors due to channel conditions

Small factor wireless devices, like sensors, cannot easily run the (whole)
TCP/IP stack
Image src:http://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/digitalguide/images/Misc/mobile-ip-ch10-1.gif

14/05/2012

Internet Problems & Limitations

polyzos@aueb.gr

10

Problems in Security and Trust

Internet protocols were designed for operation in a
trustworthy environment
User and data authentication, integrity and privacy were NOT
considered

The Internet was designed to forward all traffic (best effort)

power to the sender
Denial of Service (DOS) attacks, SPAM

Firewalls, SPAM filters, etc. proposed as security patches

Efficiency (overhead)
Delay
Complexity
Heterogeneity

security protocols not uniformly used

14/05/2012

Internet Problems & Limitations

polyzos@aueb.gr

11

Address Space Limitations

IPv4 clearly failed to provision addresses for the huge number
of devices that require Internet connectivity nowadays
Network Address Translation (NAT) was proposed as a patch
Breaks the fundamental end-to-end design principle
NAT has also negatively affected accountability, since malicious traffic
sources behind NAT routers are more difficult to track

IPv6 designed to address it

Allows significant expansion of the IP address pool
But still much software and hardware only compatible with the old
IPv4 standard

14/05/2012

Internet Problems & Limitations

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12

Routing Scalability
Border Gateway Protocol
(BGP) is also hitting its
performance limits

Growth of the BGP Table - 1994 to Present

Requires address
aggregation to work
efficiently which is
problematic due to Mobility
and Multihoming trends
Has exponential
communication cost
Instability
Churn
Convergence Problems
14/05/2012

Image src: http://bgp.potaroo.net/bgprpts/bgp-active.png

Internet Problems & Limitations

polyzos@aueb.gr

13

Content Distribution
Bandwidth demanding applications have emerged
Eg. IPTV, 3DTV, Telepresence

Flashcrowd effects are difficult to mitigate in the Internet

Cannot have a CDN everywhere
Caching is done only at application layer (level of granularity of whole
information object only)
IP packets are opaque -> not easy to do content-aware traffic
engineering

Multicast could help but at the inter-domain level it is

problematic (IP Multicast)
Address allocation, Group management, Overhead related problems

14/05/2012

Internet Problems & Limitations

polyzos@aueb.gr

14

Quality of Service
QoS configuration, policy setup, billing and inter-provider
setups, is still an open issue in current Internet
The current Internet architecture does not provide the right
incentives for network operators to invest in QoS mechanisms
because:
(a) the endusers cannot easily track the source of service degradation
(b) the current routing protocols are QoS-unaware
(c) the charging and negotiation problems between providers render the
provision of end-to-end QoS guarantees extremely difficult

14/05/2012

Internet Problems & Limitations

polyzos@aueb.gr

15

Management and Control Limitations

Initially network management in the Internet was simple
a network with a single owner
modest number of hosts participating into it

Simple distributed algorithms for managing and controlling

the infrastructure could do the job
New facts:
tremendous increase of the Internets size,
introduction of the multi-ownership model, where different
stakeholders want to apply different policies,
geographical dispersion of nodes,

Complexity of managing the network and debugging its

problems has increased dramatically.
14/05/2012

Internet Problems & Limitations

polyzos@aueb.gr

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Management and Control

Manual configuration not an option anymore
Debugging and problem isolation is now a
cumbersome task for large networks
Misconfigurations that cost time and money to be
discovered and fixed are now commonplace.
New Requirements:
Autonomic operation with self-configuration and selfhealing capabilities.
Clear separation between the data and the control plane is
needed.
14/05/2012

Internet Problems & Limitations

polyzos@aueb.gr

17

Congestion Control
End Host to End Host communication model
Congestion control left to end-hosts
Simpler network but more complexity at the edges

In search of a mechanism that allows network supported

congestion control that is:
Practical
Scalable
Efficient (no performance penalties)

Potentially taking into account caching (in-network) and

multicasting capabilities of the network as weapons for
fighting congestion
14/05/2012

Internet Problems & Limitations

polyzos@aueb.gr

18

Design for Tussle

Seminal paper:
David D. Clark, John Wroclawski, Karen R. Sollins, and Robert Braden,
Tussle in Cyberspace: Defining Tomorrow's Internet, ACM SIGCOMM
2002.

The current Internet has grown well beyond its

intended use
Different stakeholders have conflicting interests
This is the tussle in cyberspace

How can Internet evolution accommodate this tussle?

14/05/2012

Internet Problems & Limitations

polyzos@aueb.gr

19

Reading List (1/2)

Mark Handley: Why the Internet only just works, BT Technology Journal, Vol. 24,
No. 3, July 2006.
D.D. Clark, J. Wroclawski, K. R. Sollins, and R. Braden, Tussle in Cyberspace:
Defining Tomorrow's Internet, ACM SIGCOMM 2002.
D. Papadimitriou (Ed.), M. Welzl, M. Scharf, B. Briscoe, Open Research Issues in
Internet Congestion Control, RFC 6077, February 2011.
European Community Future Internet Architecture (FIArch) Experts Group,
Fundamental Limitations of current Internet and the path to Future Internet,
March 2011. Available online at:
http://www.futureinternet.eu/uploads/media/FIArch_Current_Internet_Limitati
ons_March_2011__FINAL_.pdf
BGP Table Data, http://bgp.potaroo.net/
D. Krioukov, KC Claffy, K. Fall, and A. Brady, On Compact Routing for the
Internet, ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, vol. 37, no. 3, pp.
41-52, July 2007.

14/05/2012

Internet Problems & Limitations

polyzos@aueb.gr

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Reading List (2/2)

The Future Networked Society: a White Paper from the EIFFEL Think-Tank,
P. Mhnen, D. Trossen, D. Papadimitriou, G. Polyzos, D. Kennedy, Eds.,
December 2006. http://www.fp7-eiffel.eu/fileadmin/docs/EIFFEL-FINAL.pdf
S. Paul, J. Pan, R. Jain, Architectures for the Future Networks and the Next
Generation Internet: A Survey, Technical Report, 2009. Available online at:
http://cse.wustl.edu/Research/Lists/Technical%20Reports/Attachments/891/I
3SURVEY.pdf
A. Feldmann, Internet clean-slate design: What and why? ACM SIGCOMM
Computer Communication Review, vol. 37, no. 3, pp. 59-64, July 2007.
P. Stuckmann, R. Zimmermann, European research on future Internet
design, IEEE Wireless Communications, Vol. 16, No. 5, pp. 14-22, October
2009.

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Internet Problems & Limitations

polyzos@aueb.gr

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