[e2e] Revisiting RON ("traffic engineering considered harmful"

[Jonathan M. Smith]

 Hi Jon - as always thoughtful comments. After thinking about RON a bit more,
I think of it as placing a router in the host. Thus, ALAN is a generalization
as it could implement the RON algorithms as well as others.
	I think many of the criticisms of AN proferred in the SIGCOMM and
e2e communities are rather unthoughtful. Much of the bad feeling this
community feels has nothing intellectual backing it - it is a resentment
cropping up from DARPA funding active networking at the same time that some
of the Internet community's research funding was discontinued. Many folks
incorrectly believe that there was some malicious causality linking these
two events. Not so. Correlated not causal, yet such an eminence as VJ more
or less blasted active networking for exactly this at the 1997 SIGCOMM
debate that had Dave Sincoskie and I pro-AN and Jon C and Van anti. 
	The reality is that some of us in the networking research community
believed that a way to introduce services faster was needed. While the
WWW provided an overlay that was useful for many high-level services, there
were a bunch of purpose-built network-embedded functions appearing: NATs,
firewalls, etc. Why not make a beautiful general-purpose environment that
could be used to add new services, allowed them to be tuned to play nice
with TCP, etc.? That was the goal. While capsules were an interesting
extreme case, they proved to distract too much energy away from the larger
goal of providing an environment for adding new services. So people are
attacking incrementally rather than head-on: FIRE, packet-marking.
	But intellectually, you are going to get back to the logical
equivalent of the problem IP was designed to address: interoperability.
The set of these purpose-built services begins to resemble the purpose-built
networks that an INTER-(Latin for between)-network was intended to weave
into a useful fabric. Then some set of folks will remember that some folks
in the late 90s looked into this, devise a good standard after reflecting on
the lessons, and embed it in the commodity Internet.
	
							Best,
							-JMS