Panel - S. Keshav position

        Networking research was a good idea until it became relevant   :-)

Networking has the peculiar property that a networked component
has to speak to another networked component for any useful work
to be done. Unlike OS research, where an unconnected endsystem incompatible
with every other endsystem in the world still demonstrates the utility
of an idea, in the networking world, your idea has to be widely adopted
in order for it to have impact. For instance, an improved TCP++ that
is incompatible with existing TCP would be of little use other than in
a tiny testbed. Thus, networking, by its very nature, tends to rapidly
promote standards, and once these standards are chosen, it is next to
impossible to dislodge them, no matter how broken they are.

This is the bane of networking research. For instance,
due to the widespread use
of TCP/IP, research in TCP is, for the most part, meaningless, unless
you can show that your improvement co-exists with TCP. Many years
ago, for another instance, I decided that further work in flow control was
pointless: if you did not do TCP, to be TCP-friendly, you have to
work exactly _like_ TCP, so whats the point. This same lesson
is being repeated over and over again in other arenas. As a major
example, ATM is dead because in order to succeed, it has to look
like the Internet!  To sum up, networking researchers working in areas
that are substantially standardized have to make a hard choice.
Either they pursue their dream, and ignore reality, or they
pursue reality, and become mired in the goo of the last 30 years of lousy
defacto standards.

The alternatives are either to give up on research, or to
work on an unstandardized (substandard?) area. We are seeing both.
As one looks at Sigcomm proceedings, you see more and more an
emphasis on non-traditional research. This is the flight from
standards. Or, you see people giving up research, because if
you going to be fiddling with existing standards, why not make
some money off it. (other panelists, no doubt, will elaborate
on this last sentence).

Which brings me back to my first observation. As long as
networking research was irrelevant, we could all do good work.
Now, when the success of the Internet has forced relevance upon
us, we are seeing the end of (traditional) research.