The Disruptive User - Internet Appliances and the Management of Complexity

Bringing networked computing to new users and new contexts entails a disruptive decrease in the level of user patience for complexity. This paper discusses the tensions involved in making devices as easy to use as traditional appliances, within the context of the open and rapidly changing Internet. It distinguishes class 1 appliances, whose function is fixed by the manufacturer, from class 2 appliance, whose functionality is determined by an associated service provider, and posits a third class of appliance that would achieve true ease of use by leaving control with the user while simultaneously automating much of the complexity associated with that control

A Taxonomy of Internet Appliances

The world is evolving from one in which almost all access to the Internet comes from personal computers (PCs) to one in which so-called Internet appliances (IAs) will make up a greater share of end-user equipment. Today's PC is a general-purpose, highly configurable and extensible device ? an "intelligent end-node" of the sort the Internet's designers had in mind. As such, it allows users much freedom of choice (such as which service provider to use, which Web sites to visit, and which new software to download) in exchange for dealing with associated complexity. An IA is a device connected to the Internet, but beyond that there is little consensus on functionality and target markets. There is, however, general agreement that it reduces the level of complexity seen by the user. A variety of approaches to reducing complexity are being pursued. These fall on a spectrum from totally fixing the function of devices, to automating the configuration of more general purpose systems. In the middle are devices whose functions appear more or less fixed to the user, but which retain some limited capability for upgrade through their Internet connection

Custom Integrated Circuits

Contains reports on seven research projects.U.S. Air Force - Office of Scientific Research (Contract F49620-84-C-0004)National Science Foundation (Grant ECS81-18160)Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Contract NOO14-80-C-0622)National Science Foundation (Grant ECS83-10941

Custom Integrated Circuits

Contains reports on six research projects.U.S. Air Force - Office of Scientific Research (Contract F49620-84-C-0004)Analog Devices, Inc.Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Contract N00014-80-C-0622)National Science Foundation (Grant ECS83-10941

A Framework for Scalable Global IP-Anycast (GIA)

This paper proposes GIA, a scalable architecture for global IPanycast. Existing designs for providing IP-anycast must either globally distribute routes to individual anycast groups, or confine each anycast group to a pre-configured topological region. The first approach does not scale because of excessive growth in the routing tables, whereas the second one severely limits the utility of the service. Our design scales by dividing inter-domain anycast routing into two components. The first component builds inexpensive default anycast routes that consume no bandwidth or storage space. The second component, controlled by the edge domains, generates enhanced anycast routes that are customized according to the beneficiary domain's interests. We evaluate the performance of our design using simulation, and prove its practicality by implementing it in the Multi-threaded Routing Toolkit. Keywords: Anycast, Routing, Scalable, Internet, Architecture 1. INTRODUCTION IP-anycast is a network serv..

A Consistency Management Layer for Inter-Domain Routing

This paper proposes an isolation layer -- a shim -- betweeninter-domain routing and packet forwarding. The job of this layer isto coordinate between Autonomous Systems (AS's) on when and how tomodify the forwarding state to ensure inter-domain routing loops donot cause forwarding loops. The benefits of a consistency layer aretwofold. First, it prevents the creation of transient inter-domainforwarding loops and the resulting packet loss, high latency, andconnection failures.Second, by taking the burden of forwarding consistency off theinter-domain routing protocol, it enables inter-domain routingprotocols with more complex convergence characteristics than BGP, suchas protocols that optimize route selection based on performance. Weoffer two possible designs for the consistency layer. We prove thatboth designs are free of forwarding loops and show they are easy todeploy in the current Internet