From: Kate Everitt (kteveritt@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Oct 05 2004 - 22:24:42 PDT
V.G. Cerf and R.E. Kahn, "A Protocol for Packet
Network Interconnection," IEEE Transactions on
Communications, 22(5):637-48, May 1974.
Review: Katherine Everitt
This paper discussed the choices made when
interconnecting packet switched networks. The
fundamental problem addressed was that different kinds
of networks have differing constraints on packet size,
throughput, time delay, and packet structure and
meta-information.
This paper’s main strength was the explanation of the
major issues involved in designing a protocol to link
packet switched networks. I felt the most important of
these were assigning responsibility to the different
parts of the interconnected network (i.e. the concept
of gateways), addressing packets correctly given that
they may need to be split up, and confirming correct
delivery efficiently (i.e. the windowing system).
Secondary issues such as segment and packet formats
were related but those choices followed from the
primary decisions.
As this was a seminal survey paper, it is short on
weaknesses, but I felt more concrete examples of
applications, networks and their specific constraints
would have served to motivate this paper better.
Although this work is 30 years old, it is very
relevant to the present because it succinctly
expresses very basic concepts that we use in
networking today and clearly identifies the roles of
various parts of the network, which help with
understanding where bottlenecks are and how current
networks are structured.
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