Post date: Jun 19, 2012 5:21:00 PM
Reviewed Article:
B. Carpenter. "Architectural Principles of the Internet", RFC 1958, June 1996 [txt]
This article presents guidelines that have been found useful in helping designers and reviewers of protocols for the Internet.
Articles as this seems to be the answer that addresses one of the problems encountered in the work of Clark [1] which identifies the need for a designer guide as one of the challenges encountered by the implementation of the TCP/IP protocol. I applaud the idea of a collection of guidelines as a collaborative effort from the Internet community as this only suggests that despite undeniable competition, collaboration is still possible in the interest of global connectivity.
Based on the article, "The network's job is to transmit datagrams as efficiently and flexibly as possible. Everything else should be done at the fringes." This goes to show that despite one of the main issues in [1] pointing out that fate sharing relies heavily on the hosts and forced the Internet to be assumed untrusted, it is still the recommended nature of how the Internet must be assumed. However, it seems the notion of 'flow state' and 'soft state' as mentioned in Clark's paper have been realized to some extent as shown by the succeeding paragraph in the article pointing out that some state and session information were also being maintained in the network.
As final remarks, I simply wonder why they limit the number of references to two fundamental papers. I thought it will be more helpful to the reader/evaluator if they can use as much references as bases.
[1] D. Clark, "The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols", SIGCOM'88, 106-114, Palo Alto, CA, Sept 1988