![]() ![]() You have transformed the technology industry several times with the spanning tree that transformed Ethernet, with link state routing, and with TRILL. I believe that understanding design tradeoffs and alternatives will be far more beneficial than memorizing the details of one protocol suite, and will enable the students to think critically, and will increase their ability to design new things. Instead, I believe students should be taught the concepts, such as "how would one acquire a network address without being configured", and then study a bunch of different approaches that could exist, or have existed in other protocols. Rather than approaching it as a science, students are merely told to memorize the specifications of the existing deployed devices. I get frustrated with how networking is taught in many places. What changes do you think need to be made to the way engineers and computer scientists are taught? Many network protocol designers learned the field from your books, and keep a copy on their bookshelves. And, try to think about and understand various approaches, and the tradeoffs between various choices. This is a combination of "what customers are asking for", "what customers don't even know they want yet" and "what can be solved with something simple to understand and manage". Start out with finding the right problem to solve. What advice would you give to fellow engineers? TRILL will fix these problems, but do it in a way that is completely compatible with everything. While spanning tree-based Ethernet was popular because of its simplicity and ability to self-configure, it didn't make optimal use of bandwidth, and was, for subtle geeky reasons, somewhat fragile. Ironically, one of the things I've been working on these days is replacing the spanning tree with a new technology, being standardized in IETF, called "TRILL" (Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |