Douglas Comer & lessons learned from the Internet project
Recently we had a interesting talk by Prof. Douglas Comer at IIT Bombay. We have referred some of the networking books authored by him, though there is big list of books in front of his name. I must say his books as well as his talk was very nice. You really learn many good things out of them. Prof. Comer is a professor at Purdue University and currently Vice President at Cisco research.
His talk was on "Lessons learned from the Internet project." The talk covered issues they faced while designing internet protocols. His presentation was very precise and highly informative. (you can find that at - xys.ccert.edu.cn/reference/
Some of the interesting things he mentioned -
1) how research idea is assessed from commercial perspective. As the students of networking we learn a lot about routing, shortest path algorithms. But in reality, "Internet routing is not based on shortest paths." :)
Its all about the Money.
2) debate with telephone companies regarding connectionless vs. connection oriented infrastructure design. (finally Internet guys won ! )
3) one good lesson for people starting with new project idea - start with specific goal, rather than trying for solution for all possible cases. In short - "Don't try to save the world" :)
He also talked about some open research problems -
1) understanding the behavior of traffic in the internet.
2) routing issues. Still there are problems of route flapping & black holes.
Good thing about his talk was his technical elegance, and his sense of humor. I didn't sleep in a 1hour lecture, that too at 2 in the afternoon :)
Also please go through some of the essays on his homepage. I read through this funny essay regarding OSI design - which depicts the 7 dwarf types from which 7 layers of OSI came up :D
regards,
-Rahooooool
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