Post date: Jun 20, 2012 5:26:23 AM
Reviewed paper:
D. Clark, M. Blumenthal. "Rethinking the design of the Internet: The end-to-end arguments vs. the brave new world", ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, Vol. 1, No. 1, August 2001, pp 70-109.
I only had a preprint of the paper, I believe this is the one that is subject for review on the journal where they passed it.
In this paper, the authors are giving reviews on how the Internet is coping up with the growing number of Internet users, (and thus, increasing and varying user demands,) and the difference between the use of the Internet in the era of its conception and after the turn of the century. I observed that the paper was done in the time almost after the dot-com bubble phenomena happened; the time when most of the companies who invested on the Internet as a medium suffered major loss. At first, I thought this was the motivation of the paper.
The paper started with issues on the recommendation (based on end-to-end arguments) that application functions must not require implementation in lower layers. It is suggested that lower-layers maintain general-purpose services. In the time of the writing, the paper mentioned that there are user-specific demands that force some applications to require implementation in the core of the network. As I have observed, it seems the dilemma presented boils down to the fact that the principles of the 'end-to-end arguments' gave too much power to the end-users. In the previous review, I thought it is acceptable to 'hope' that end-users are, to some level, trustworthy because their benefits lie on the successful operation of the Internet. It turns out that this is not always true and users have different interests. As the base number of users grow and the massive potential of what the Internet can provide is already realized, there are plenty of factors that has to be taken into consideration to allow various services to still be accommodated by the network. Moreover, it is not unlikely that interest of users can clash while some users will maximize their benefits even to the expense of other users and/or the network. (If we can view the Internet as a game of end-users, it is quite impossible to arrive at a Nash Equilibrium. hahaha.) With this, it is clear that there is a need to use the underlying network so that the power at the edge of the network will be minimized, and the underlying network will have more control of the communications done through it. Moreover, there is a need to ensure that the network is protected, i.e. main function of the network will not be disturbed by additional functions installed on it.
In conclusion to what I gained from reviewing these computer network papers, I appreciated that I got a glimpse of the Internet's history. Moreover, I get to understand the motivation behind the existence of some Internet concepts and functions.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Some definitions for enlightenment:
What are end-to-end arguments?
From my understanding, these are set of 'rules' that informs the reader of how the Internet is designed in order for these readers to design applications that will suit well with the design of the net.