From: Jenny Liu (jen@cs.washington.edu)
Date: Mon Oct 04 2004 - 02:20:59 PDT
The DARPA internet protocols provided a solution to the problem of interconnecting existing networks to create an internet that was fault-tolerant and versatile enough to support different types of communications services and networks. The DARPA internet protocols made it possible to share data and resources across different networks. Since their inception, some of the protocols have been widely adopted as standards for government and commercial networking use. Since the DARPA internet protocols were designed to support a real and specific interconnection of actual existing networks, the solution is a practical one. And since the designers assumed that there would be other sorts of networks to interconnect in the future, the solution is a scalable one. However, the versatility of the DARPA internet protocols to support different types of communications services and networks comes with a cost of overhead; some performance is sacrificed for generality. Nevertheless, given that the bandwidth of physical links and the processing power of computers are increasing over time, the sacrifice in performance is more than made up by the gain in generality. With commercial use of the internet becoming commonplace, some of the less important goals (such as accounting of resources and cost-effectiveness) established for the internet architecture at the time of its inception are now taking on greater importance and have not yet (?) been properly addressed.
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