(no subject)

D. Clark, The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols, ACM
SIGCOMM 1988

This paper provides a historical context for the design of the (roughly
speaking) IP, TCP, and UDP protocols that we find in the Internet today.
The author stressed the original (prioritized) design goals of the
Inernet (the top three being fault-tolerance, multiple service support,
and multiple network support) and how these priorities shaped the
Internet.

To me the major point this paper attempted to convey was how the
prioritized design requirements shaped the Internet, and that a different
set of priorities (or even different ordering) could potentially create a
much different network. However, I felt that the strongest argument made
in this paper was the simple end-to-end and open access design of the
Internet.

I believe that the end-to-end design of the Internet contributed to its
growth in the commercial sector. While some companies may lament the lack
of accounting and qualitify of service support built into IP layer, it is
not clear that the Internet would be as widely adopted or experience such
explosive growth if greater complexity was designed into the network.
Previous attempts to redesign the network with such support, such as ATM
networks, have largely been a failure.
Received on Thu Sep 14 2006 - 09:14:16 EDT