Networking research — A reflection in the middle years
Networking research — A reflection in the middle years
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网络研究——中年反思
DOI：
10.1016/j.comcom.2018.07.001
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发表时间：
2018
影响因子：
6
通讯作者：
Schulzrinne, Henning
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Schulzrinne, Henning
网络不再是计算机科学和工程的一个新领域-它已经成熟为一门学科，它支持的主要基础设施，互联网，很久以前主要是一个研究工件。我相信我们应该将自己视为互联网的土木工程师，主要帮助了解和改进庞大而关键的基础设施。这意味着实施变革需要几十年的时间，而不是会议周期，而且实施在很大程度上是由与现有基础设施的兼容性和成本效益的考虑驱动的，而研究所关注的资源，如带宽和计算周期，往往比有限的组织变革能力发挥的作用要小得多。特别是电信运营商，它们已经变得与航空公司类似，主要运营其他公司设计的设备，重点是营销，而不是创新。与其他工程学科相比，标准更重要，无论是由标准机构还是主导者制定。鉴于标准的多年时间框架和国家资助机构支持标准化工作的有限意愿，这使得研究更难产生影响，蜂窝网络日益复杂和进入壁垒也使大多数研究人员无法为商业移动的网络的大部分做出贡献。
Networking is no longer a new area of computer science and engineering – it has matured as a discipline and the major infrastructure it supports, the Internet, is long past being primarily a research artifact. I believe that we should consider ourselves as the civil engineers of the Internet, primarily helping to understand and improve a vast and critical infrastructure. This implies that implementing changes takes decades, not conference cycles, and that implementation is largely driven by compatibility with existing infrastructure and considerations of cost effectiveness, where resources that research focuses on, such as bandwidth and compute cycles, often play a much smaller role than limited organizational capacity for change. Telecommunications carriers, in particular, have become akin to airlines, largely operating equipment designed by others, with emphasis on marketing, not innovation. Even more than in other engineering disciplines, standards matter, whether set by standards bodies or dominant players. Given the multi-year time frames of standards and the limited willingness of national funding bodies to support standardization work, this makes research impact harder, as does the increasing complexity of cellular networks and barriers to entry that shut out most researchers from contributing to large parts of commercial mobile networks.