Re: Is IETF is being shunned for new protocol development?

[Joel Halpern <[e-mail]>]

There is one observation about repeated history I would like to add to 
Craig's clear note.  We periodically get folks who say "but my case is 
so important that we should redesign the stack to optimize for my case.  
All you need to do is wait 5 years, and something else will be "so 
important".

Yours,

Joel

On 1/15/2026 10:54 AM, Craig Partridge wrote:
>
>
>     Take a look at ESUN in OCP. They are developing a new network
>     layer header
>     for use in scale-up networks. The perceived problem is that IP is
>     too much
>     overhead. It's really the IP header plus UDP header since
>     convention is
>     that new transport protocols are encapsulated in UDP. There is a
>     four byte
>     header proposed that would be used instead of 28 or 48 bytes for
>     IP v4/v6.
>
>
> I've been watching but staying out of this discussion as it is as old 
> as IETF (it was an issue when I was on the first IESG) and I'm not 
> sure I have anything new to offer.
>
> But as a protocol nerd, I couldn't let this technical statement go 
> past...  We have been down this path of smaller headers/simpler 
> headers/headers multiple times in the past 50 years (cf. LOCUS, XTP, 
> etc.).  They work in tightly constrained environments and then fail 
> miserably at wide area scale and they show up at IETF and say "how can 
> we layer this on top of TCP?"  [Meta point -- they almost inevitably 
> want to scale to wider areas]
>
> Those headers field in IP are there for very good reasons. Yes many 
> are not needed in certain situations (a great way to see this is to 
> look back at TCP header compression - on a point-to-point in-order 
> link you can get TCP+IP headers down to, if I remember right, a 
> byte).  But if you want a fully general solution (and most folks who 
> think they don't need a general solution, cf. NetWare, eventually 
> discover they do), there's not a lot of wastage.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Craig
>
> PS: Hugh Holbrooke, as my PhD student in the distant past, presumably 
> is aware.
> -- 
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