On the complexity and manageability of Internet infrastructure

Abstract

The ever increasing complexity of the Internet has made it impossible to effectively manage the Internet infrastructure. In this paper, we argue that the increased complexity was due to the “random accidents” introduced throughout the evolution of the Internet, such as ad-hoc based routing, cross-layer optimizations. These ad-hoc events increased the vulnerability and degraded the manageability of Internet. We also propose a new framework for network design and deployment, termed “assurable communication networks (ACNs)” that places the manageability in the center in network architecture. We suggest that rigorous mathematical model be developed for the measurement on the impact of manageability and accountability.

Keywords

network architecture / complexity / manageability / measurement

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