Background| blabs
Early models of packet networking used a hop-by-hop paradigm of control. Each intermediate device (a “router” in Internet parlance) would use a control loop with its adjacent neighbour and retransmit any frame that was not explicitly acknowledged as received by the neighbour. Such models were used by the X.25 protocol,…| blabs
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meets three times a year to work on Internet Standards and related operational practice documents. In July of 2025 the IETF met in Madrid (finally, and only after a number of thwarted mis-starts!) with more than a thousand folk in attendance through the week.…| blabs
The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meets three times a year to work on Internet Standards and related operational practice documents. In July of 2025 the IETF met in Madrid (finally, and after a number of thwarted mis-starts!) with more than a thousand folk in attendance through the week.| blabs
Last month, in June 2025, I reported on our progress with the adoption of the QUIC transport protocol. Here I would like to look at the mechanisms used to trigger a client application (typically a browser) to connect to the server using the QUIC transport protocol.| blabs
Networks are typically built to provide certain services at an expected scale. The rationale for this focussed objective is entirely reasonable: to overachieve would be inefficient and costly. So, we build service infrastructure to a level of sufficient capability to meet expectations and no more. In ideal conditions this leads…| blabs
There has been a major change in the landscape of the internet over the past few years with the progressive introduction of the QUIC transport protocol. Here I’d like to look at where we are up to with the deployment of QUIC on the public Internet. But first, a review of the QUIC protocol.| blabs
Yearly Archives: 2025 | labs.apnic.net
The Internet is, as its name suggests, a network of networks. The glue that holds this together is the inter-domain routing protocol, BGP, or Border Gateway Protocol. BGP is a flooding protocol whose objective is to ensure that all the BGP speakers across the Internet see the same picture of reachable address prefixes. The paths of how to reach to each prefix is relative to each BGP speaker, so the paths contained in each local view of the Internet all differ to some extent, but the intention...| blabs
I would like to look at the ways in which the operators of the number Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) have deployed this infrastructure in a way that maximises its available and performance and hardens it against potential service interruptions, or in other words, an examination of the resilience of the RPKI infrastructure.| blabs
The interdomain routing fabric of the Internet is a somewhat chaotic space. It is not a “centrally managed” space by any means. There is no single entity that is responsible for the Internet’s routing environment. No permissions are required to join, and no notice required to leave. A network doesn’t…| blabs
The story of computing and communications over the past eighty years has been a story of quite astounding improvements in the capability, cost and efficiency of computers and communications. If the same efficiency improvements had been made in the automobile industry cars would cost a couple of dollars, would cost fractions of a cent to use for trips, and be capable of travelling at speeds probably approaching the speed of light!| blabs
When the Internet outgrew its academic and research roots and gained some prominence and momentum in the broader telecommunications environment its proponents found themselves to be in opposition to many of the established practices of the international telecommunications arrangements and even in opposition to the principles that lie behind these arrangements. For many years, governments were being lectured that the Internet was special, and to apply the same mechanisms of national telecommun...| blabs
One of the more active areas of activity at the IETF falls under the remit of the DNS Operations Working Group. It’s an operational Working Group rather than a protocol development working group, but nevertheless the DNS is a very rich topic area with much to talk about. There is a view that this level of attention of unwarranted, as the DNS is just another application layered upon a common Internet substrate. However, I think that this perspective is missing the point that the DNS is an in...| blabs
The Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) is a remarkably simple system. You send queries into this system via a call to your local host’s name resolution library, and you get back answers. If you peek into the DNS system you’ll see exactly the same simplicity: The DNS resolver that receives your query may not know the answer, so it, in turn, will send queries deeper into the system and collects the answers. This query/response process is the same, applied recursively. Simple.| blabs
The DNS Operations, Analysis, and Research Center (DNS-OARC) brings together DNS service operators, DNS software implementors, and researchers together to share concerns, information and learn together about the operation and evolution of the DNS. They meet between two to three times a year in a workshops format. The most recent workshop was held in Atlanta, in February 2025. Here are my thoughts on some of the material that was presented and discussed at this workshop.| blabs
I recently attended NANOG 93, in Atlanta in the first week of February (https://nanog.org/events/nanog-93/agenda/). The dominant theme of the presentations this time around was the combination of automation of network command and control and the application of Artificial Intelligence tools to this control function. The interest in AI appears to have heightened of late, and while the hype levels are impressive even for an industry that can get totally fixated on hype, the deliverables so far s...| blabs
The internet is held together by the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). It’s an “interesting” protocol in many ways. Each BGP speaker uses a reliable transport protocol to send local reachability information to its adjacent peers. The inference is once a BGP neighbour has been informed about a new item, whether it’s an update about reachability of an address prefix, or its unreachability, then there is no need to repeat this information until the state of the prefix has changed. A BGP ses...| blabs
Time for another annual roundup from the world of IP addresses. Let’s see what has changed in the past 12 months in addressing the Internet and look at how IP address allocation information can inform us of the changing nature of the network itself.| blabs
During the recent IETF meeting it was pointed out to me that we got it all wrong when we called the end-to-end transport flow control algorithms “congestion control,” as this was a term with negative connotations about the network and the quality of the user experience. If we had called this function something like “performance optimisation,” then maybe the focus of the work would be not on how to avoid network congestion and packet loss, as such transient behaviours are intrinsic to ...| blabs
The choice of UDP as the default transport for the DNS was not a completely unqualified success. On the positive side, the stateless query/response model of UDP has been a good fit to the stateless query/response model of DNS transactions between a client and a server. The use of a UDP transport enabled the implementation of highly efficient DNS server engines that managed high peak query rates. On the other hand, these same minimal overheads imply that DNS over UDP cannot perform prompt dete...| blabs
The DNS is a crucial part of today’s Internet. With the fracturing of the network’s address space as a byproduct of IPv4 address run down and the protracted IPv6 transition the Internet’s name space is now the defining attribute of the Internet that makes it one network. However, the DNS is not a rigid and unchanging technology. It has changed considerably over the lifetime of the Internet and here I’d like to look at what’s changed and what’s remained the same.| blabs