From: Jonas Lindberg (jonaslin@kth.se)
Date: Sun Oct 03 2004 - 03:22:03 PDT
In "The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols" Clark discusses
the goals, ideas and reasoning that greatly influenced the design of the
Internet. It is my opinion that Clark is successful in his ambition to
explain many important design issues and put those into context. The paper
has a good structure, is well written and easy to read.
Clark starts with explaining the fundamental goals that was considered when
designing the Internet and how this affected the basic structure of the
Internet. This is very interesting and gives a good background. However, I
would have found it even more interesting had Clark explained the
alternative choices better and what the consequences of those would have
been (e.g. what are the alternatives to using gateways and what effects
would choosing circuit switching have had?).
Clark continues with discussing secondary goals and tradeoffs that were
made. Many of these goals originate from the Internet being aimed for
military purposes. One interesting question, which could have been discussed
more, is how the design of the Internet would have been different if it had
been intended mainly for commercial purposes.
The second half of the paper is more technical and discusses implementation,
performance, datagrams and TCP. This is also explained in a good way and is
easy to understand. Clark gives some very interesting comments in this part,
for example on page 113, where he says that it may have been better if TCP
had been designed to provide flow control on both bytes and packets. I think
more retrospective comments like that could have made this paper it even
more interesting.
I find this paper very relevant; it explains the history of the design of
the Internet - a design that is in use and has great effects on today
society.
Jonas
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