The following is a guest blog post from Computing Community Consortium (CCC) council member Jennifer Rexford from Princeton University.
Over the past few weeks, as I shelter in place like so many of us, I am increasingly grateful for the Internet. A research experiment that escaped from the lab, the Internet has become a critical global infrastructure over the past twenty years. As difficult as the current Covid-19 situation is, at least we can use the Internet to support the global collaboration of scientists, keep abreast of the latest developments, teach our students and children, stay in touch with friends and family, and even find much-needed moments of levity.
The early designers of the Internet made some remarkably prescient decisions. With a focus on reliability and flexibility, they designed a network that could withstand equipment failures and support a wide range of applications. Indeed, today’s Internet supports a diversity of network devices and applications far beyond anything the early designers could ever have imagined. To me, the most exciting choice the early designers made was to place so much of the Internet’s key functionality in the end-host devices — the many computers running at the perimeter of the network. That decision had the profound effect of democratizing innovation, lowering the barrier for who gets to add new content and new applications to the network. We see the fruits of that decision all the more today, as so many people come out of the woodwork to offer free “content” to entertain, educate, and inspire us at home.
Many people wonder if the Internet can handle the abrupt shift toward people working and learning from home. The Internet has faced unexpected challenges before, whether from the Internet’s own “success disaster” that caused congestion collapses in the late 1980s, or from large-scale cyber-attacks that frequently overload parts of the infrastructure, or from physical damage during wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters. We have learned from those experiences, and the Internet infrastructure has improved markedly as a result. The Covid-19 situation is admittedly different in that it primarily changes the way we use the Internet. Overall, though, the Internet has weathered the storm reasonably well, at least so far. The Internet protocols are adapting to the increased load, to offer reasonable service to many by sharing the available resources. Plus, companies have taken important steps, such as limiting the rate of video-streaming traffic, relaxing bandwidth caps on low-income households, or deploying additional capacity in critical locations.
Still, we have much to learn from this experience, too. While it may be too early to pinpoint the most important lessons, a few concerns are clear already:
- Digital divide: With students all over the country and the world relying on distance learning, the availability of good Internet connectivity (and good computing resources) is more important than ever.
- Low latency: Interactive applications are particularly difficult for the Internet to support well, given the “best effort” nature of the underlying network.
- Security and privacy: Security and privacy concerns are paramount, as evidenced by the vulnerabilities found in popular video conferencing software (such as Zoom), changes in traffic patterns that foil existing cyberattack detection techniques, and more.
- Usability: Internet technologies are still far too hard to use, whether people are configuring a home WiFi router, using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to connect to work or school, or coordinating a class or meeting via video conferencing.
Clearly, many of these are interdisciplinary challenges, going far beyond the design of network protocols or operational practices. The computer networking community needs to continue to work in concert with many other areas of computer science, and with companies and policy makers, to create an Internet that is truly worthy of the trust society increasingly places in it. I for one hope we can take the lessons we learn in the days ahead to heart, and redouble our efforts to improve the Internet’s reliability, security, performance, and usability in the years ahead.
At the CCC we know that everyone is dealing with a lot in these unprecedented times. We are continuing to work on behalf of the computing research community to catalyze research, but we also want to provide ways to help the community. This blog is part of a series of posts about ways computing researchers are using computing to adapt and help in these times. We hope you find something that may help you, either now or in the future.
