Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Overhaul the TCP/IP Stack

Today, a friend of mine stated one way to make lots of money is to build a smaller TCP/IP stack. The current stack size is 16K. A smaller stack will enable faster transfer due to more data per packet, faster packet composition/processing and less bandwidth. Companies such as Microsoft, Sun, Cisco would definitely pay a lot of money for the stack.

A way to do that is to move the stack to hardware. To quote the movie Antitrust:

The answer's in the box.

However, I take a different view. The Internet was built in 70's as part of the DARPA project. Technology has advanced so much since then that we need a complete overhaul of the stack. A new, better beginning. You cannot build space-ships out of automobile technology.