From: Tom Christiansen (tomchr@ee.washington.edu)
Date: Mon Oct 04 2004 - 02:00:38 PDT
This paper provides the historical background for TCP, IP, and UDP as well
as the Internet in general. The main purpose of the paper is to clarify the
design choices behind the Internet protocols.
The paper is well-written and clearly explains the overall goal of the
Internet project: "...to develop an effective technique for utilization of
existing interconnected networks." This presented a significant challenge as
the network protocols must continue to work despise loss of network nodes,
gateways, or entire networks. In addition the protocols must support a
variety of systems running various operating systems with network
connectivity ranging from slow packet radio networks to high-speed (by 1988
standards, anyway) T1 connections. The fact that at present time, some 25-30
years after the protocols were designed, the protocols are still in use is
probably the strongest statement of success. It isn't even until recently
that there has been a need to expand the address space of IPv4 into that of
IPv6.
The paper mentions a few key limitations or tradeoffs: Header size vs. data
record size in TCP packets. Transmission errors are handled an the
transmission protocol level, not network level. Thus, data must be
retransmitted from its source IP rather than from the network gateway where
the last successful transmission occurred.
One of the goals for the protocol development was to develop support for
distributed management. The paper mentions that this goal has not yet been
reached. Given the fact that nearly everything with a network connection is
configurable via HTTP and TCP/IP these days, I would say than this goal has
been reached.
-- Tom Christiansen
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