Despite its respectable age (the first specification was published in September 1981), TCP is still alive and researches and IETFers continue to develop new extensions to improve the protocol. Multipath TCP received a lot of attention during the last years. Another TCP extension to improve the security of TCP has been submitted for the next IETF meeting. TCP crypt aims at improving the security of TCP by allowing the utilisation of crypto mechanisms to protect the TCP segments.

Since several years, Cisco routers have included a feature called mpls autobandwidth that allows the router to compute automatically the bandwidth required for an LSP and adjust the reserved bandwidth. This feature seems interesting, but personally I have always feared that it could cause oscillations in a network if the change in reserved bandwidth leads to a change in paths for the concerned LSPs.

The retransmission timeout plays an important role in allowing TCP to recover from segment losses. Over the years, extensions to TCP have been developed to reduce the reliance of TCP on the retransmission timer. Recently, a SIGCOMM paper proposed to use microsecond resolution timers in TCP. A recent IETF draft summarizes the discussions on TCP's retransmission timer, but surprisingly it does not discuss these microsecond resolution TCP timers.

The root servers of the Domain Name Systems are highly redundant. This redundancy is important to ensure that the root DNS service continues to be provided even if one of the DNS root servers fails. These servers are well maintained and fail rarely. However, on October 1st, the H instance of the root DNS servers maintained by the US Army failed.

During the last week, two recent IETF drafts have proposed to simplify some important aspects of the operation of BGP.

Researchers have traditionally shared information about their ongoing work via mailing lists, conferences and publications in journals and at conferences. Recently, some researchers have started their own blog where they post reflections, discuss about research fundings or ongoing projects. Here are a few blogs maintained by networking researchers or operators that a networking researcher may find useful :

Networking researchers

• SIGCOMM's official blog
• Nick Feamster's blog
  

A good researcher, young or old, must stay informed about the progress of his/her field. In the 20th century, the library was the researcher's best friend to stay informed. Most researchers spent some time regularly in the library to browse the table of contents of the new magazines and journals. Some companies even published special journals that contained abstracts of papers published in key journals. Current Contents was one of these journals.