Transport protocols and bulk file transfer

[Scott Brim <>]

For your possible entertainment, developments high up in the hourglass,
on Day 1 of the IETF.  These have only a small near-term effect on
Internet2's stakeholders, but may turn into something in the longer term ...

HTTP 2.0 is in full swing.  For transport they are starting from
SPDY-over-UDP and tuning that as needed through the working group
process.  They considered using SCTP but were "concerned about
deployability".  (In any case, there are questions of how to make SPDY
work with whatever lies underneath, e.g. SPDY itself will do out of
order delivery but SPDY compression likes an in-order pipe from whatever
is under it.)

In the meantime RTCWEB (HTTP-based realtime communications) has adopted
SCTP-over-UDP as its transport.  That means SCTP/UDP will be in every
browser, and that's going to infect every OS, step by step.  Someone
from Firefox has already ported FreeBSD SCTP -- ported to what
environment, I don't know, but that's the first step.

I don't know where all this is going to lead.  Ultimately it will affect
what we can do and want to do.

And that's just day 1 :-).  Tomorrow I'll be at the SDN research group
so I'll miss both TCP and HTTP but I'll get some reports.

Scott