Review - The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols

Paper: The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols by David D.
Clark.

Name: Robert Danek.
Course: CS2209, Fall '06.

The paper "The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols"
explains the
the reasons behind why the internet protocol suite developed into its
current
form. In particular, the paper outlines the initial design goals that
were taken into account when the protocol was being defined, and proceeds to
illustrate how the top few goals resulted in the protocol being datagram
based.

The main goal of the design was to allow disparate networks to
communicate with
one another. The next goal was to ensure that end-hosts can continue to
communicate even if a failure occurred at some of the intermediate nodes in
the network. This second level goal was achieved by using an approach
called
fate-sharing, in which only the end-hosts that are talking to each other
maintain the state information about their connection. These top level goals
led naturally to the development of a connectionless datagram based
protocol. The
datagram approach also allowed functionality to be layered on top of it
when
required.

The paper also discusses a number of the lower level goals, such as
accountability. Had these goals taken higher priority, the protocol likely
would not have evolved as it has. The paper concludes by suggesting that
there might be a better way to design the protocol to take these other
goals into account as well.
Received on Wed Sep 13 2006 - 23:42:39 EDT