From: Karthik Gopalratnam (karthikg@cs.washington.edu)
Date: Sun Oct 03 2004 - 22:47:02 PDT
Review: Design Philosophy of the DARPA internet protocols - D.C.Clark
This paper aims to clarify the design goals and considerations that went
into building the TCP / IP protocol suite. The paper highlights the
tradeoffs made and tries to assess the impact of these design decisions on
the future evolution of TCP/IP as it is increasingly deployed in the
internet. The paper motivates the need for a datagram-centric design for
TCP/IP, as well as a protocol which does not maintain any connection state
in the network itself by clearly prioritizing several possibly competing
goals. The design decisions are very well justified in light of these goals.
One possible drawback with the design as presented, is the fact that
these design goals might not hold in today's Internet which is far more
inhomogeneous in terms of actual network components as well as types of
service required for content and management. The goals of a protocol suite
would probably place more emphasis for instance on accountability and ease
of management. Also glaring is the omission of the network security aspect
and the behavior of the network in the presence of malicious entities either
at the ends or the core of the network. This seems like a critical necessity
in today's internet and it would seem that a protocol suite with security as
a design goal would prove quite different from the curent TCP/IP design.
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