making networks ‘session aware’ and ‘deterministic

http://www.networkworld.com/article/3084466/network-management/128-technology-aims-to-fix-the-internet.html

This has many limitations that the industry has built a bunch of workarounds for. That’s why we have load balancers, firewalls, network address translation, deep packet inspection, MPLS and several other technologies. Here is where the problem is: Whenever a network needs to be changed, sometimes one or maybe all of these need to be touched, and performance is often still degraded because the “shortest path” may not be the best path.

Routers need to be more than packet-pushers

128 Technology is trying to make networks “session aware” and deterministic. What that means is routers can’t simply be packet pushers and take a packet in and forward it on to the next hop. Right now packets are sent off everywhere and then reassembled when they reach the destination. Any packets going down a bad path are marked as lost and then retransmitted. This can be hell on networks and can cause significantly more traffic to be sent than is necessary. All of those other devices are needed to help regulate the traffic.

A session-aware, deterministic router can monitor all inbound and outbound traffic and be able to send all traffic from the same session down a particular path and then keep track of it. That will improve the quality of transmission and make networks faster without the need for many of the other devices that customers buy today. This should also make it easier to find problems and fix them, since there’s no need to continually run traceroutes and pings to figure out where traffic is going.