[ih] the state of protocol R&D?

[Paul Vixie]

distributed system research tends to focus on measurable results, which
means it's glued to the side of the DIY hardware world (raspberry pi,
etc) and the open source software world. within those worlds there are
two relevant signalling levels: applications and physical/network/transport.

applications, to be practical at scale, have to live inside HTTP or
HTTPS, or at worst, SSH. (think of rsync or git here.) when we build
things that we want people to be able to use, we pick a common
denominator like "web" or "reliable stream". new UDP applications in the
style of DNS or NTP cannot be created in today's global internet since
so many edge and middle boxes won't allow anything they don't understand.

physical research, for practicality purposes, is focused on "how else
could we carry IEEE 802 around?"

network research, for practical purposes, is dead. IPv6 might catch on
some day but it's the last change we'll ever see.

transport research, for practical purposes, is dead. SCTP is better in
every way than TCP, but see "edge and middle box" comment above.

we are in other words in the post-research phase of planet scale
networking, shackled to the wildcat success of the lab grade toy
technology called "the internet".

that to me is the state of "protocol R&D", and those are the underlying
reasons why there's not a lot of it going on.

(yes, i am still bitter about RFC 6013 not being allowed to have a TCP
type code. bear with me while i get over it.)

vixie