DARPA Review

This paper describes the goals of Internet architectural design in
the order of importance and discussed protocol features corresponding
to these goals. According to the author, the fundamental goal of
DARPA internet is an effective technique for multiplexed utilization
of existing interconnected networks, while the secondary goals
include important issues such as tolerant to failures of networks or
gateways, the support to multiple service types, the accommodation of
a varieties of networks.

 From this paper, I got to know why and how Internet and TCP/IP
become what they are today. Previously, I just took this for granted.
However, the ideas in this paper are developed primarily for end-to-
end communications. Nowadays, people may look at the design of
internet in a different way.

With the advent of P2P networks, live streaming, multicast and
broadcast applications, new failure tolerant schemes and new type of
services need to be designed. Fate-sharing protection may not be
suitable in broadcast applications or parallel downloads. For
example, in case of frequent host failures, a host may send a packet
and then leaves immediately, then we need maintain state information
among intermediate nodes. Intermediate nodes should not only relay
packets, but also do coding operations to increase throughput. Coded
packets may serve as a substitute for datagram in future. Also, as we
have more and more live streaming applications on Internet, we might
want to replace retransmission with error correcting techniques on
both lower layers and application layer, for retransmission means not
live. Error correcting protocols should also take network topology
into consideration.

In general, the paper is one of the cornerstones that shape the
Internet into what they are today. However, at that time, it wasn't
able to consider application and topology factors in its Internet
design philosophy.

Di Niu
Received on Thu Sep 14 2006 - 00:26:12 EDT