On Wed, 18 Feb 2015, Dave Taht wrote:
* While ram and flash have grown to be essentially "free" I really dont see home router and cpe makers rushing to embrace slower languages or bigger flash and memory requirements anytime soon.
That's because there has been no requirement to do so, most of the time. Basically a device has been sold with a certain amount of features, and this featureset hasn't changed over time, thus there is no need to future-proof. I see this changing.
Also, currently most routers consists of mostly L2 high speed forwarding, with some L3 thrown in between two ports (the WAN port, and the 5th internal port to the 5 port switch chip with 4 external ports). With homenet, all this changes. Now all ports need to be L3. This is a huge change both when it comes to bandwidth needed from the CPU to the ports, and also L3 performance needed. This will require home gateway manufacturers to make very different devices.
We also have the (previous) mobile SOC:s trickling down into the home router space, and these are very price/performance efficient.
Requiring Erlang in a router is a complete non starter for me. Proposing java is almost palatable - a headless android, for example - but these are devices that are presently struggling to forward packets at speeds faster than 100mbit.
We're talking about a protocol decision here. People seem to focus a lot on the "running code" part here. ISIS is used for numerous things of apart frmo the MPLS and Traffic engineering space, we also have IEEE 802.1aq (SPB) and TRILL, it's also used in the GMPLS control plane. There are probably 10-20+ commercial implementations of ISIS, if not perhaps the exact TLVs we're talking about here. Most of not all of these standards are described in standards track RFCs.
Against this, we have Babel, which as far as I can tell has a single implementation that has been forked into two, and is based on a few experimental RFCs.
I have generally ruled out batman because it is A) linux-only and B) at layer 2.
What platforms do the current implementations of Babel support?
My experience, like jim´s with 802.11s, was horrible, but for all I know it can be improved, and there is pretty general support for it out there. At least some testing with 802.11s + another routing protocol connected to ethernet connected to 802.14 would be sane.
Do we really believe people are going to use wifi links to connect devices within their homenet? Also, won't these be 5GHz and avoid a lot of the problems we've seen historically with Wifi? Also, don't we think IEEE will improve the behaviour of 802.11? It seems to me people are advocating for routing protocol selection based on yesteryears problems.
* I, to this day, have never really got the whole link state argument. With DV, if I want to know the topology, I do a traceroute.
That will give you the path there. That is not the same as topology. We need topology for some things, that's why HNCP is a "link state" protocol.
A) I would like, for one, to actually be able to use a routing protocol to do multi-homing to multiple ISPs.
That is already a requirement as far as I know.
The advantages of BGP multi-homing for very large businesses are undeniable, and I do dearly wish the same capabilities were available to smaller business lacking the resources to obtain and manage an AS number, but desiring to mitigate their risks of an internet outage. And there is an advantage of having such an ability to the ISPs themselves - they net more customers.But I know I am dreaming.
That is exactly what homenet is all about. You're not dreaming.
C) I would like to see more corporate, and academic, and other ongoing financial support dedicated to improving and maintaining the code.
What code? Routing protocol? Hnetd?
The level of investment into the people working on core infrastructure like quagga, babel, bird, ISIS, etc is pathetic. I am seeing a bit of an uptick in things with the increased popularity of SDN (cumulus is doing some good work), but still nothing even remotely close to the level of investment into switching technologies like VXLANS and trill and so on.
The Erlang ISIS code is aimed also for this kind of market. I don't have details, but I've heard talk that it's also running on SDN kind of devices.
D) Certainly the IS-IS folk would be welcomed to try their stuff at the upcoming battlemesh. The ospf people also. Under test there are OLSR, batman, BMX, 802.11s, and static routing.
Is the "wifi mesh" really the same thing as "homenet"? I'd say the requirements are vastly different.
I do keep hoping, with bake-offs like that, more resources poured into getting it right, and more testing, that better metrics, techniques, and code will emerge that make for clear winners among the protocols, and across the various media types of concern. Thus consensus can be reached, and world peace, achieved.
My employer has so far been very supportive of these kinds of implementations. However, we want an extensible protocol (we want to use ISIS for more functionality than it's used for currently) and we need topology, so babel won't work for us.
I see homenet as primarily wired between the homenet routers. I don't believe in wifi for connecting different devices. People don't build mobile networks by using the mobile network to connect base stations. They use fiber or dedicated point-to-point highspeed microwave links to connect the base stations. If you want the homenet to work properly and efficiently, then the same thing applies here.
If people are making routing protocol decision based on the fact that they think most of the homenet links are going to be current incarnation of 802.11, then we're lacking consensus on a lot wider range of requirements than just the routing protocol. We have different opinions on what homenet actually is and what it's going to look like.
-- Mikael Abrahamsson email: [email protected]
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