From Rough Consensus to Automated Reasoning

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of formalizing networking rules to enable automated reasoning and knowledge reuse, addressing the current ad hoc practices and lack of systematic understanding in the field.

Contribution

It advocates for developing formal grammars of networking rules and demonstrates how this approach can unify diverse solutions to the same problem.

Findings

Different solutions to the same networking problem are developed independently without explicit knowledge reuse.

Formalizing rules can facilitate automated reasoning and improve consistency.

Current practices lead to redundant efforts and hinder progress.

Abstract

Unwritten languages today often have no official grammar, and are rather governed by "unspoken rules". Similarly, we argue that the young discipline of networking is still a practice that lacks a deep understanding of the rules that govern it. This situation results in a tremendous loss of time and efforts. First, since the rules are unspoken, they are not systematically reused. Second, since there is no grammar, it is impossible to assert if a sentence is correct. Comparing two networking approaches or solutions is sometimes a synonym of endless religious debates. Drawing the proper conclusion from this claim, we advocate that networking research should spend more efforts on better understanding its rules as a first step to automatically reuse them. To illustrate our claim, we focus in this paper on one specific networking problem, and show how different instances of this same problem were solved in parallel, resulting in different solutions, and no explicit knowledge reuse.