Following my last post in which I worked through various definitions of reliability in networking, it’s time in this post to look at the main protocol contenders, and examine how they measure up to those definitions. Let’s recap quickly with a list. Reliability can mean… Soft delivery guarantees. Hard delivery guarantees. Hard delivery guarantees along the entire path. (This wasn’t mentioned last time, but we’ll get to it.) Strict ordering of packets.

In the past months, I have not written much. I pushed forward with work for the Interpeer Project. But more recently, I also started as a researcher at AnyWi Technologies, joining friends from a past job. There, we participate in public/private resarch projects into next generation commercial drone platforms. While both domains have a multitude of differences between them, one strong overlap exists in the need for reliable and performant networking connections over the public Internet.

It’s not what you think it is. A few weeks ago, I led my connections to a single-question survey, asking what the currently most utilized distributed consensus algorithms is. This isn’t the largest group in the world, but it’s also a fairly mixed bunch: a majority is in the tech industry, but almost as many are not. Some or old guard, some entered the field only a while ago. Some are more research inclined, some more practically oriented.

“Bazaar, Cairo, Oct-2011” by maltman23 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 Or how Blockchain gets consensus wrong. Over twenty years ago, Eric S. Raymond wrote an essay that changed the software development world. Titled The Cathedral and the Bazaar, it outlined his experience in trying to understand and emulate the success of the Linux operating system kernel. The essay set down some observations in rules that other projects should follow for similar success.