Thursday, October 10, Volen 101, 2:00-3.00 pm
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. It is intended to be provocative, making people question the things people assume are true; instructive, giving hints as to how to avoid some of the problems in future protocols; and inspirational, convincing students that there are ample opportunities to make contributions.
This talk discusses wrong turns that have been made, such as what necessitated the invention of bridges, and what caused IP multicast to be unimplementable. It also talks about how a protocol, even one "proven correct", can go horribly wrong, such as the unstable ARPANET protocol for distributing routing information. It talks about "obvious" tricks such as version numbers, that even today protocol designers insist on misusing. And it covers some of the areas in which research is most needed.
Bio: Radia Perlman is a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems. She is known for her contributions to bridging (spanning tree algorithm) and routing (link state routing) as well as security (sabotage-proof networks). She is the author of "Interconnections: Bridges and Routers", and co-author of Network Security: Private Communication in a Public World", two of the top 10 Networking reference books, according to Network Magazine. She is one of the networking industry's 25 most influential people, according to Data Communications Magazine. She has about 50 issued patents in the fields of routing and security. She has a PhD in computer science and degrees in mathematics from MIT.
Host: Liuba Shrira