From: Ethan Phelps-Goodman (ethanpg@cs.washington.edu)
Date: Sun Oct 03 2004 - 19:15:59 PDT
The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols
David Clark
This papers explains the goals and rationale behind the design of the TCP/IP protocols. It does a very good job of explaining why the protocols evolved the way the did, without being overburdened by technical details. One of the best points the paper makes is that nothing in the internet protocols had to be designed the way it was, and that the final protocol isn't in any way perfect. Some goals, such as survivability and adaptability were well met, while lesser goals such as resource management and accountability were not well met. The top three goals were interoperability, survivability and adaptability. These led to the current architecture of stateless datagram IP layer that can support multiple service protocols on above it and mulitple networks architectures below. The paper talks about shortcomings of the internet that were becoming relevent in 1988, such as management, performance guarantees, and accountability. While alternative designs addressing these problems are briefly mentioned, I would have liked more discussion whether it would be possible to insert these changes into the existing internet.
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