CRITICAL REVIEW: The Design Philosophy

of the DARPA Internet Protocols

January 31, 2018

CSC 762
Advanced Networks and Security
Reading 2 Assignment

Submitted From:
Kastuv Mani Tuladhar
Department of Computer Science
School of Art and Science

1
Summary
This paper has described the numerous concept to design the better inter-
net protocol. Considering the paper was written in 1988, the internet has
evolved to be a massive network. The key objective of this paper is to in-
troduce the context and background to extend the internet. The author also
described some evolutionary changes required to develop the internet archi-
tecture. The primary goal of the DARPA is to design interconnected net-
work between wired and the radio network using the multiplexed resources.
The DARPA designers used packet-swtich network that constitutes store and
forward technology. The unification of all the heterogenous domains have
allowed to bloom the internet today. The secondary goal of the DARPA
is to design distributed management, unifying the heteregenous equipment
together to access the same network, cost-effectiveness. The internet is de-
signed in a layer. This allows TCP and UDP packets to form a seperate layer
as IP and form the bottom layer of the intyernet to be simple and flexible.
This paper has emphasized that the internet should be simple than a com-
plex. This made sure that the packets are delivered correctly and the burden
of the verification is palced in the end hosts and bottom layers. The main
motivation for the DARPA is to form the military network that has efficient
security, privacy and authentication mechanism.

Critical Analysis
The interesting thing about this paper is to think about the packet switching
that would multiplexed all the layered approach to process the data and
ensured the delivery of the packet which otherwise would need to resend the
data in other words it has dealt with the timeouts and the retransmission
that would have occured in circuit switch network. However, this paper
has not introduced the security issues that has turned out the most crucial
problem in the later internet eras. Another weakness about this paper is that
they have not come up with the detailed designing features of the TCP/IP
layer as it has covered the broad issues of the network design. Considering
today, the solution provided by this paper is highly scalable and successful.
The Internet that time surely had a number of problems but from a designer
prospective, whta made it most successful is the simplicity and scalability.

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Conclusions
This paper provides the retrospective view of the internet back to 1988 which
is informative and provides the great guide to design and develop TCP/IP
suite of the internet. It is still relevant to the research communities to read
this paper to know about the actual motivation of the design of the TCP/IP,
its requirements and principles.