Tuesday, February 23, 2016

From Voice to Web to Content Optimized Networks

To the extent we can say legacy telephone and mobile networks were optimized for voice as a lead application, as radio, TV and cable TV networks were optimized for delivery of video or aural content, then we might also say that Internet Protocol networks were less optimized than traditional networks.

That is to say, IP networks were designed as general purpose networks. With the advent of broadband transport and access, IP networks began to function better for all media types: narrowband wideband and broadband.

However, it now seems possible to argue that future iterations of the IP networks will again begin to focus on “lead apps.”

ATIS has launched an “Evolution to Content Optimized Networks (eCON) Initiative,” a to create an evolutionary path from today's IP-based routing network to a future network that leverages the increasingly important role of content.

We already have seen the growth of solutions to optimize content delivery and improve user experience, including edge-caching, end-to-end encryption and proxies.

In the future, further changes are necessary, ATIS believes, including moves to embrace content naming.

Basically, that means embracing content as a primitive, an approach that promises greater scalability, security and performance for users retrieving content over IP networks.

In other words, instead of network routing organized around endpoint locations, routing and network layer functions could be additionally optimized around specific content identifiers.

That is expected to make easier location-independent retrieval (so edge caching is more efficient), allow better load balancing and support multicast in a more native way.

No comments:

"Tokens" are the New "FLOPS," "MIPS" or "Gbps"

Modern computing has some virtually-universal reference metrics. For Gemini 1.5 and other large language models, tokens are a basic measure...