One of the Internet ‘Founding Fathers’ John Day Lauded for Network Research Foresight

Few have a stronger command of the workings of internet architecture than BU Metropolitan College (MET) Master Lecturer in Computer Science John Day. When recent widespread outages to high-profile websites like Spotify, Reddit, and Twitter once more revealed the faults in the foundation of the digital superhighway that Day has long critiqued, it brought new attention and credibility to the set of improvements to current mainstream internet protocols he has been championing for a decade.

Day was respectfully dubbed “one of the internet’s greybeard founding fathers” by spiked magazine, although he demurs “I am old but not that old!” In 1970, he was a new graduate student, at the same stage in his career like many of his students today, when the 6^th computer went live on the ‘Net. Day has developed the concepts behind Recursive InterNetwork Architecture (RINA)—an effort he has said came about not to “fix” the internet, but rather to find the principles of internetworking. As described in spiked, “His proposals . . . revisit and build on Louis Pouzin’s founding concept of datagrams, whom Day is still working with today. These simplifying features allowed the original inter-networking protocols (IP) to get out of the door in the 1980s and 1990s, and allowed for the rapid growth of the internet. But the current system we have—TCP/IP—is holding back new innovation. RINA adds vital quality-of-service guarantees for performance.” Such quality-of-service guarantees could forestall content-delivery network outages and failures, like the ones that have cropped up recently.

Day teaches Operating Systems (MET CS 575), Computer Networks (MET CS 535), and Advanced Networking (MET CS 775), a part of the MS in Computer Science with concentration in Computer Networks curriculum. Networking is a generalization utilizing all the concentration areas, as well as the issues of the economics and politics of the industry positioning MET students for advancement. At first shocking, Day says, “the best way I know to get a bad design is to do requirements.” He has found that first one needs to pull out the invariances to avoids ‘devils-in-the-details’ and then instead finds ‘angels,’ where today’s complex problems (security, mobility, IoT) turn out to be inherently simple, vital to the ability of networks to maintain infrastructure. The requirements largely take care of themselves. At MET, his students have the opportunity to discover new angels in RINA. “To join our research is quite simple: take a course with me!” Day says. “In essence, the course is the interview.”