From: Charles Reis (creis@cs.washington.edu)
Date: Mon Oct 04 2004 - 00:43:46 PDT
Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols
David Clark, 1988
The paper describes the reasoning behind the initial design of the Internet, showing how DARPA's main and secondary goals influenced the implementation of TCP/IP, and thus its strengths and weaknesses. Beyond the basic structure of interconnecting many packet switched networks using store and forward gateways, the design reflected both the practical desire to exploit diverse existing networks and the military's need for a survivable system using stateless intermediate nodes. The paper does a very good job showing how particular decisions, and notably the relative priority of design goals, led to the current implementation of the Internet and the necessary compromises between its goals, such as the relatively weak ability to provide accounting and the pitfalls of end-host implementations. However, while the motivations were often expressed clearly, discussions of alternative designs that met the goals in different ways were occasionally missing or shallow.
Certain original goals, such as accounting and resource management, are clearly shown to be areas which require future work, and Clark goes as far as suggesting a new "flow" building block for improving the architecture as part of his concluding remarks. While such a proposal perhaps belongs in a paper of its own, it indicates the valuable chance to reflect on the original goals of the Internet to improve its current design.
--Charlie Reis
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