For those of you who have been
following the development of NOIA Network, and more importantly
for the benefit of those of you who haven’t, it might be high time to step back
and refocus on the big picture.
NOIA began back in early 2018
with the aim of developing a distributed P2P Content Delivery Network (CDN),
governed by blockchain. The essential idea was to access hitherto untapped and
idle resources (available bandwidth and disk storage space, residing in
individual home computers and elsewhere) as an economical alternative for
caching data on behalf of content providers.
Through the release of a NOIA
Token, transactions would be facilitated between content providers and
individual node operators.
Through the cooperation and
efforts of
NOIA and her numerous partner relationships, to date over 5,000 NOIA
Nodes have been downloaded and activated, sharing over 25TB’s of spare data
capacity.
But NOIA has not stopped there.
During the process of developing their CDN network, NOIA became intimately
acquainted with various challenges in their ever vigilant efforts in
identifying business opportunities.
This has been the real
demonstrated strength of NOIA. Apart from being just another technology startup
with a novel idea, they have proven relentless in seeking to fully exploit the
business case potential of their venture.
It was with this aim in mind,
as they began focusing on the workings of the internet in relation to their CDN
development, that it became abundantly clear that the current state of internet
architecture and routing protocols were limiting internet performance — with
the main culprit being BGP.
BGP (Border Gateway Protocol)
is responsible for selecting the best route from among all available paths for
data to travel upon in order to reach its intended destination. As BGP is
designed to always select the shortest path, this has also proved to be its
greatest weakness. Too often the “shortest” path becomes oversaturated and
gives rise to inefficiencies.
Of course, BGP was designed for
reliability, not performance — and in the 90’s, when the internet consisted of
maybe 10,000 websites, it was fine. But today, when there are more than 45
billion web pages on the internet with many applications requiring ever greater
speed (i.e. live streaming), BGP is more of a bottleneck than anything else.
To put it in perspective: since
its inception, virtually every aspect of the internet has changed and been
improved, but BGP has remained the same.
As a result, today’s internet
performance is largely unpredictable, unreliable and unsecured.
BGP hi-jacks occur frequently
on the public internet and latency remains a big issue.
Additional negative effects are
service disruptions, SLA Agreement breeches, lowered productivity and degraded
user experience. In the case of BGP Hi-jacks, one can only react once the
transgression has been detected, and by then, the damage has largely been done.
All this translates into
substantial costs for Technology Companies, Enterprises and Internet Service
Providers — costs that run into billions of dollars annually.
Of course, Internet Overlay
Networks are able to address these concerns. But these options can be
prohibitively expensive as well as require some degree of dedicated physical
connectivity — hence, not a realistic option for many.
Nonetheless, NOIA
began exploring how, through a Software Defined Network (SDN), the limitations
of a BGP constrained performance reality might be addressed — using the same
low-cost alternative cost structure approach and exploiting existing and developing
elements as they did with their CDN development.
An SDN brings agility and
flexibility to a network. Unlike traditional network architectures where
individual devices make traffic routing decisions according to pre-configured
routing tables, an SDN, through a centralized control console, enables a
network engineer to direct traffic without needing to access individual
switches in the network.
By focusing on a network’s
control plane separately from the data plane, decisions concerning how packets
of data should flow through the network can be made, with the data plane then
moving the packets accordingly.
So an SDN consists of various
nodes with built-in rules that direct traffic as determined by a controller.
This means that congested paths, or paths with low capacity and speed, can be
bypassed and avoided in favour of available and underutilized paths, resulting
in improved performance.
Although SDN technology has
been around since 2011, the rate of adoption has been slow and limited to
larger companies, including telecoms and carriers, as well as network
operators. For smaller and mid-sized entities however, the cost of SDN
deployment remains a major obstacle.
But it is a testament to the
genius of NOIA that to overcome this obstacle, they have seized upon the key
features of an SDN and wedded it to the newly emerging concepts of Segment
Routing (SR), and IPv6.
IPv6 was developed in response
to the burgeoning IoT world in order to allow for the creation of a much
greater multitude of IP addresses. Unlike IPv4 (which has been in use since the
1970's), IPv6 provides much more flexibility — even enabling administrators to
encode instructions into the individual data packet headers to specify router
paths, thereby allowing individual packets to travel independently.
Segment Routing (SR), then
enables routers to understand the routing information via the IPv6 packet
headers, so that unique routing paths can be selected.
This has the potential to
minimize public internet latency. While IPv6 adoption is at something like 30%
across the industry, routing hardware is already today able to support segment
routing.
Also, not every router needs to
be segmented routing enabled. In fact, only a single router may be necessary to
“route” traffic — especially as it nears its last mile.
So by applying both IPv6 and
Segment Routing, private network features can be made readily available on even
a public internet — with ‘smart’ data and standardized routers.
But for this to happen, the
knowledge as to which routers are available on a public internet would be
required — something which at present is not available.
However, through a distributed
ledger (blockchain), this can be achieved while keeping all information
decentralized through the use of consensus protocols.
This combining of IPv6
architecture with Segment Routing (SR), has been designated as SRv6.
With SRv6, network operators
can now steer traffic over diverse paths in light of traffic levels and state
of the network. That means, using SRv6, existing networks infrastructures can
be optimized. New possibilities such as bandwidth management, bandwidth
calendaring and bandwidth-on-demand become possible. SRv6 can also help protect
against denial of service (DDoS) attacks by redirecting traffic to a scrubbing
device (to ‘clean’ traffic before re-injecting it back into the network).
But the question remains, what
would motivate a telco, or any router for that matter, to allow data to make
use of their infrastructures?
Well, NOIA has thought of this too.
By developing a distributed
ledger listing all IP addresses and participating routers seeking to sell the
use of their infrastructure for smart contracts on a centralized internet
exchange, anyone will be able to buy and sell internet access points anywhere
in the world. In short, everyone can trade their excess capacities.
With such a concept, no longer
will network operators be limited to buying and selling internet access to only
those with whom they have a direct cable connection.
Plus, only select access points
close to one’s destination need to be bought in order to efficiently control
how traffic behaves as it nears the end of its journey. Of course, via the
exchange, either full routes or discreet access points (or pieces) can be
bought and sold throughout the world as needed. You can pick and choose the
points you need.
In short, what NOIA is doing is
a first — developing a truly Programmable Internet.
Together with their partners, NOIA is building the first SRv6 network —
with self-onboard capabilities and with many server combinations available. The
launching of a network function marketplace with a distributed ledger and a
decentralized internet exchange means the features of a private SDN and
improved performance can now be made widely accessible to all at a reasonable
cost.
Consensus protocol ensures the
whole process remains decentralized and NOIA’s controller (or any other), can
be used to program various features while smart contracts take care of
authentication.
So in addition to having come
up with some very nifty ideas, NOIA is now poised to deliver a truly solid
business case application with widespread appeal and potential. In other words,
it’s definitely getting interesting.
NOIA’s Programmable Internet
allows ISPs, Data Centres and individual infrastructure providers connect to
Distributed Ledger and sell infrastructure as internet transit. This can be
done through NOIA Platform which is World’s First Programmable Internet
Backbone As a Service.
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