The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols
by David D. Clark
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| type: | misc | | year: | 1988 | | pages: | 106--114 | | annote: | David D. Clark (Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Laboratory for Computer Science; Cambridge , MA. 02139); | | address: | Stanford, CA | | abstract: | he Internet protocol suite, TCP/IP, was first proposed fifteen years ago. It was developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and has been used widely in military and commercial systems. While there have been papers and specifications that describe how the protocols work, it is sometimes difficult to deduce from these why the protocol is as it is. For example, the Internet protocol is based on a connectionless or datagram mode of service. The motivation for this has been greatly misunderstood. This paper attempts to capture some of the early reasoning which shaped the Internet protocols. | | volume: | 25 | | month: | jan | | journal: | ACM Computer Communications Review | | number: | 1 | | booktitle: | SIGCOMM |
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This was a very interesting paper in its explanation of philosophies and historical contexts of internet architecture. It is amazing that the fundamental design goal was to allow generalized interconnection between different network, when the initial goal seemd to be quite specific. It is curious what would internet like today if they used unified system approach - the author discusses it would have been impractical as the original purpose was to incorporate existing networks, but maybe some kind of intermixed apporach could have been possible - clustering networks by their types, build unified system for each cluster, then interconnect these clusters.
Their choice of using datagram seems to share same philosophy with modularization - isolating each data packet removes needs for various assumptions and helps generalization of services but it suffers overhead of redundancies and lack of global optimizations.
This paper stated the original goal of the Internet--to build a interconnecting network which allows utilization of existing networks and distributed administration. The paper told us a lot about many trade-offs in designing the early Internet in order to serve the goal. It argues why using end-host or "fate-sharing" approach ,and why splitting TCP/IP. All these arguments are provided solid reasons as well as analysis of its benefits and downsides. It is also learned that the design and protocol of the Internet was changing all the time, and many changes were due to meet the emerging demands of users.