Emerging Internet Protocols A and B

Term Paper Proposal

Ima K.U. Student

EECS 780 Term Paper – Prof. James P.G. Sterbenz

24 March 2008

Emerging Internet Protocols A and B

Protocols A and B are competing to replace protocol H in the future Internet. I plan to first review the historical development of protocol H. Protocol H has become the dominant mechanism and de-facto standard for delivering content in the Internet [Estrada 1987]. It allows flexible user specification of QoS (quality of service) parameters and a flexible user interface for content selection and viewing. Protocol H has two major modes of operation: client-serer and peer-to-peer.

In client-server mode, users either get content indexed from their ISP (Internet service provider), or must subscribe to a third party service. In either case, a session is established that allows the user to browse indexed content using a standard Web browser. Once a user selects the desired content, a UDP-port-9898 flow is established over which the content is streamed. In peer-to-peer mode, users join an overlay session using the join-overlay command to port 9899. This requires the location of one of the overlay managers, typically by searching the Web for “protocol h p2p content manager”. It is important to note that a number of ISPs block ports 9898 and 9899 in an attempt to force users to subscribe to their own content in client-server mode. A number of out-of-band mechanisms have been used to dynamically negotiate other high port numbers to subvert these restrictions. Furthermore, users have been TOSsed[1] for serving content in this manner, as well as for excessive bandwidth usage when not subscribing to the ISP-sanctioned service. There have also been concerns expressed that as the fraction of UDP traffic devoted to Protocol H increases, the Internet will be in danger of severe congestion since Protocol H over UDP does not perform congestion control.

Recently, there have been detailed evaluations with the problems of increasing Protocol H usage, and a number of competing proposal for replacements have emerged [Smith 2007]. In an attempt to define architectural requirements, the prot-h IETF working group has issued an architectural framework for evolution [Ramanathan 2007].

A number of these early proposals have merged, and there are now two major proposals: Protocols A and B [Tanaka 2006]. While providing similar functionality to the user, the implementation and operation of A and B are quite different. Protocol A is being developed through the IETF [Doe 2007], and there are several early open-source implementations for a variety of operating system platforms. Protocol B is backed by a consortium led by Monopolies-Я-Us and BTI (Big Telco Inc.). While there has been some limited information available on its operation [Monopolies 2006], the only implementation to date is a closed-source client distributed by BTI for the Monopolies-Я-Us OS.

Figure 1: Performance Comparison: Protocol A and B [Tanaka 2006]

In this term paper I plan to describe Protocols A and B in more detail and describe their differences. While it appears that Protocol A is technically superior with continued performance enhancements (as shown in Figure 1), the industrial forces behind Protocol B make it unclear which will win in the market place.

References

[Doe 2007] Jane Doe and John Doe, Protocol A Specification, IETF Internet Draft (work in progress), Feb. 2007, .

[Estrada 1997] Franco Estrada, et al., Protocol H Content Delivery, Internet RFC 7000 (standard), May 1987.

[Smith 2007] Susan Smith and John Jones,“Emerging Protocol Options for the Internet”, IEEE Internet Protocols, vol. 2 no. 3, Mar. 2007, pp. 7 – 15.

[Ramanathan 2007] S. Ramanathan, An Architectural Framework for Protocol H Evolution, Internet RFC 9999 (informational), IETF, Feb. 2007.

[Tanaka 2006] Akira Tanaka and Georg Müller “A Survey of Proposed Enhancements to Protocol H”, Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Protocol Enhancements (ProtEnh 2006), Bangalore, June 2006, pp. 205–215.

[Monopolies 2006] Protocol B: The Future of Content Delivery, industry white paper, .

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[1]TOSsed refers to termination of service for violation of the terms of service (TOS) contract.