Today in class we read about a lot of the current problems with BGP routing. I was astounded to discover that a significant portion of BGP prefixes (around 25%) continuously flap and can take hours to converge to the correct route. Furthermore, the authors claim a 400 fold reduction in churn rate when using their protocol, the hybrid linkstate path-vector protocol or HLP, which seems to me reason enough to implement the routing protocol, yet we are still BGP.
This makes me feel a little discouraged when faced with the prospect of finding an area of networking research that could eventually be useful enough to be implemented in real networks. Maybe I am thinking on too large of a scale, I am sure there are many aspects of LANs, enterprise networks, etc., that could be modified and updated easily, but since I don't plan on being a system administrator, most of the research I do will be geared toward improving the Internet. However, since the Internet is so large, I understand the difficulties in implementing new architectures and protocols, but when helpful protocols, like HLP, that could make a significant impact on the Internet gets rejected, then there seems little hope for any research idea I could come up with.
On a more positive note though, I am sure that HLP had a significant impact on improvements in BGP in the last few years and there are other avenues of networking research that we have not discussed in class as of yet that could work better for prospective research ideas, such as wireless networks. So I am looking forward to covering that (as well as our sure to be interesting discussion on net neutrality next lesson).
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