Internetworking Arch. & Protocols: Project

Introduction

The Internet performs many important functions and provides a wide range of important (and increasingly critical) services . Internet functions are mostly concerned with providing for reliable and timely delivery of "bit buckets" across a network made of up of heterogenesous physical components. Routing, naming, and congestion control are examples of such functions. Internet services (such as the web, p2p systems, e-mail) build upon the basic functions to provide value to network users.

The Internet should be viewed as a continuously eveloving enterprise. The functions it provides and the services it performs today are the result of at least five decades of evolution. It is important also to realize that the evolution also continues and, as a result, the Internet of the future is likely to be substantially different from the Internet of today.

The Internet as we know it today is one instantiation of a wide-area network. It is, therefore, important to realize that the exact state of the Internet functions and services today is the result of a multitude of low- and high-level design decisions . The reasoning for the technical design choice made in various cases varies. Some decisions were deliberated over and have some technical foundation. (e.g., the decision to fragment and re-assemble only at end systems). Other design decisions were made because they were the fastest to accomplish a higher level objective and not because they were the best possible solution (e.g., the decision to use TCP for the Web). Many (if not most) of the design decisions were dictated by others made earlier. Also because transmission and computing technology has advanced, the reason for many design decisions is no longer applicable.

In the early days of the Internet, it was possible to change designs with impunity. With the Internet today serving an infrastructure function and with its tremendous global scale, changes range from being very difficult to basically impossible. For example the transport protocol was changed from NCP to TCP in relatively short time for the entire Internet in the early 80's. Such a transition is basically unthinkable today.

We argue that a true understanding of the Internet and its future should be undertaken in this historical and evolutionary context. This project aims to provide an opportunity for students to study the Internet from this perspective.

What you will have to do

In groups of 3 or 4 (depending on the size of the class) you will

Project Deliverables and Milestones

Grading

Possible topics