Can TCP/IP Survive?

In releasing this section for comment, I would like to point out that the report’s conclusions are based on a cumulative examination of various protocols and systems. We are at a point of time where other protocols and systems are equally problematic—the report points to some significant problems with DNS structure and scalability, and also points out that, to all intents and purposes, the basic email protocol, SMTP, is broken and needs immediate replacement. … Some of the significant developments not foreseen at the time of the original design include: Parts of the system are now over 20 years old, and the Internet is required to perform a number of important functions not included in the original design. New protocols have been developed, and various patches have been applied to base protocols, not always evenly. It seems appropriate to examine whether the current systems and processes are still appropriate. … It appears that TCP/IP’s main advantage is its capacity to scale backwards to existing old systems. Apart from that it appears to be in need of fairly significant modification for scaling to the future, where voice traffic, Internet television and other factors (see Future Needs section of the report) may demand a more sympathetic base protocol. … **Traffic Prioritization Issue** Although TCP/IP has proven to be remarkably robust, it may not scale to the future. In particular, TCP/IP does not know how to differentiate between traffic priorities (e.g. visiting a website requires a fairly immediate response as soon as we click on it, email delivery can wait a few seconds). This lack of prioritization is one of the major causes of the “slowness” of the Internet as perceived by users (real speed is something quite different and has a lot of other factors). **Unsuitability for Financial Transactions** As pointed out by Dr. Greg Adamson, “A financial transactions architecture must be deterministic: the result of the transaction in the overwhelming majority of cases has to be what was meant, and when it is not there should be evidence of what went wrong. The design of the Internet protocol suite TCP/IP is non-deterministic. It aims to achieve overall reliability in a network, not necessarily individual reliability for each segment of that network. … There are also security issues with TCP/IP, with researchers warning of vulnerabilities that need to be addressed. In April 2004, a major alert was issued to deal with a fundamental vulnerability. **Performance Issues** Users of large scale sites are already experiencing problems with the protocol, which tends to suggest that ordinary users will become affected in the near future, as bandwidth and processing availability continues to grow. **Assessment** TCP—if not TCP/IP—needs to be replaced, probably within a five to ten year time frame. The major issue to overcome is the migration issues (see below) **Migration Considerations** The problem of a new TCP is as complex (if not more so) that the TCPIPv4/v6 changeover which the Internet community has found very hard to deal with. However, the factors in slow IPv6 deployment largely revolve around the fact that there is no communicated compelling reason to change. Given that a point of time will arise when changes to TCP are necessary for basic performance, it can be expected that, if a migration is conducted with appropriate change management planning, the adoption will be far quicker and far smoother than the IPv6 changeover. However, some basic factors need to be taken into account: