The article RFC 1958 entitled "Architectural Principles of the Internet" is a brief outline of principles and observations regarding the evolution of the design of the Internet. It begins with a discussion of the nature of change and existence and nature of an "Internet Architecture." The rest of the paper enumerates various principles in four areas: general design, naming and addressing, external issues, and confidentiality and authentication.
The RFC upholds the end-to-end principles to be of central importance (2.3, 4.5, 6.2, 6.5). "The network's job is to transmit datagrams as efficiently and flexibly as possible." While it is acknowledged that certain services like routing, QoS and compression where the network needs to maintain states, the amount of state that the network needs to maintain should be minimized. The focus on end-to-end functionality that I strongly agree with. The network can, at best, _facilitate_ the services that need to be done over the network, the productive services themselves will exist at the end-point machines.
Other common themes that are emphasized throughout the RFC are the following: Proven, "good enough" solutions should be chosen (3.2, 3.7, 6.4) and that Standards should be as widespread as possible (3.2, 3.13, 3.14, 4.2, 5.3, 5.4, 6.5).
RFC 1958 as a whole is an excellent "ten-minute" treatment of the principles behind 30 years of the Internet's design and I strongly recommend it as part of the CS 255 reading list.
References
B. Carpenter, RFC 1958: "Architectural Principles of the Internet", 1996
No comments:
Post a Comment