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.
For more details checkout also here :- www.noia.network