As we saw in the later session on middleware, performance guarantees need to extend all the way to applications, across the middleware in host computers. The talk of Dr. Jamin illustrated that the Internet is so complex that it may be wise to add additional infrastructure for the purpose of better organizing it on a global scale. The approach he advocates is akin to adding a routing information layer over the whole Internet, just as IP is a routing address structure blanketing the Internet. Or akin to adding beacons in a harbor. His talk illustrates that the Internet has a life of its own, which is hard to predict.
Much research is needed now to determine how to better harness the power of the network.
Dr. McCane's talk again illustrated how difficult it is to organize communication in the Internet. If a single source node is multicasting information to a set of client nodes, the Internet does not notify the source node the relationships of the paths to the different client nodes. These paths typically form a tree, branching out from the source node to the client nodes. Allocation of data rates to the various path in an efficient manner would be facilitated by knowledge of the tree. Dr. McCane's discussed how to deduce this information using statistical inference.