Paper Review for CS 552 Fall 2008

Name: Richard Martin Paper Title: The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols Authors: David Clark

Summary:

This is a retrospect paper on the TCP/IP protocols over the period from 1974-1988. The paper first describes the goals of the protocols, which centered on interconnecting existing networks. The other primary goals included survivability, supporting different higher-layer abstractions, distributed management, cost and accountability. The paper then describes the evolution of the design of the IP protocols with respect to each goal, describes the role of implementation vs. specification, and elaborates on the design of UDP and TCP. The author concludes with the limitations of IP suite.

What were the author(s) trying to accomplish?

The author's goal is to give the reader a greater understanding of why Internet protocol suite (as of 1988) is the way it is.

To whom is the work relevant, and why?

The work is relevant to network protocol designers as well as application developers using the Internet protocols. This is a large and important community. Protocol developers should understand the tradeoffs that available. The application developers should understand how a given protocol was intended to be used, so they can understand if their way of using the protocol was not as was intended.

Your opinion on the overall quality of the work.

The quality of the work is high (8 on scale of 1-10). The author satisfied the main goal of the paper, and the goal is important. I was able to follow through reasons behind the design decisions in the IP protocol family. One deficiency I thought was in understanding where the influences on the design came from. Although the paper does describe some alternatives that were rejected in some places, it does not go enough detail on where the positive aspects of the design came from. The paper also does not give much context on the raging debates about the differences between the IP suite vs. ISO suite of protocols that was happening at the time (late 1980's).