Google Summer of Code 2010 ideas

[Atis]

Hello,

I'm looking forward to participating in Google Summer of Code 2010.
Interested in networking related projects. I have a little previous
FreeBSD experience (no programming), but I have ~5 years industry
C/C++ programming experience, some familiarity with Linux kernel, and
interest in learning something new :)

>From reading http://www.freebsd.org/projects/ideas/index.html and
http://wiki.freebsd.org/Networking I selected some projects of
interest. Since not all of them have their respective mentors
mentioned, I'm sending this to the list.

Potential projects:

1) TCP/IP regression test suite
This project idea already was included in previous years, and there
was some work done by Zach Riggle (2009), Victor Hugo Bilouro (2008)
and by Nanjun Li  (2007). Could you give a broad outline what features
of this project were already completed by the work in previous summers
of code, and what new work is expected to be done in this year?
Weren't their results good enough or were they simply incomplete? I
realise that a complete TCP test suite could be a huge effort, but
exactly what features are missing? Is the work of this year supposed
to be build on the work by previous years, or to start something new?

2) SCPS, Space Communication Protocol Standards
This is probably my first project choice if all goes well. Space
protocols - this sounds very cool :) and is related to my research
interests (IP protocols over lossy networks). The first question is -
do these protocols also have some practical value? This is not-so-new
family of protocols, but it seems that very few implementations exist.
On the one hand, this could be a good thing, because now there a
chance for FreeBSD to be the first OS with open source SCPS
implementation. On the other hand - lack of use seems to imply lack of
importance and usefulness. The second question - is complete
implementation of all the protocols supposed? At first glance it seem
that e.g. SCPS Security Protocol simply duplicates the functionality
already present in IPSec. Still, support for all protocols may be
needed for interoperability and completeness of the implementation.
Also, the amount of work required for this project is very unclear at
the moment.

3) "Implement optimized trie lookups for forwarding.", from
http://wiki.freebsd.org/Networking.
Even though this is not listed as "summer of code" idea, it sounds
interesting, but what exactly does this task imply? Was there some
mailing list discussions related to the problems with current approach
and potential improvements? (What keywords to use in search?) The
first improvement idea that comes in mind is to replace the old radix
tree with a kind of LPC-trie, but does that make sense? In any case,
this project probably is over my head, especially the issues with SMP
and locking. Maybe in the future? :)
My initial ideas also included experimenting with a kind or routing
cache for FreeBSD, but after reading some (very interesting) old
mailing list discussions I gave up these thoughts :)

So, which one of these three ideas would be the most useful and
feasible? Or would you suggest something completely else for someone
with my background?

-- 
~Atis