Towards Systematic Roadmaps for Networked Systems

Networked systems have benefited from unprecedented growth in hardware capabilities, but, as we move closer to the end of the Moore's law era, future networked systems are likely to be more constrained by hardware capabilities than they have been in the past. We take the position that the networking community should, in response to this development, proactively and systematically develop networking roadmaps, which attempt to predict how trends in hardware capabilities will impact networked systems. In this paper, we discuss a possible methodology for developing networking roadmaps, and present two case studies that illustrate the methodology and reveal how increasing hardware unreliability can affect the performance of routing and transport protocols.