On the Evolution of Internet Technologies
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On the Evolution of Internet Technologies VINTON G. CERF Invited Paper The Internet has been evolving from its origins in the early utility of packet switching through its long-lived ARPANET 1970s, based on work sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced project, pursued the idea of using computers in command Research Projects Agency. While the basic design was known and control. To avoid being constrained to a single vendor’s in 1973 and first published in 1974 and the system essentially deployed in the academic and military communities on January equipment and networking technology, DARPA [1] set out 1, 1983, much has happened in the intervening 20 years. The first in 1973 to develop a nonproprietary networking standard commercial Internet services emerged in 1989 after the intercon- that would support computer-based command and control. nection of the Internet to commercial e-mail services. By 1993, It called the project Internetting [2] . commercial versions of the World Wide Web had appeared, and To understand the evolution of the Internet, one has to ap- by 2003, voice over IP service was growing rapidly, after its first commercial introduction around 1995 (See Vocaltec: http://www. preciate the basic architecture of the system and the ways vocaltec.com/html/about/company.shtml). in which it can and has evolved. As has been pointed out The Internet of the future will be shaped by the tectonic forces in many papers on the subject, the core of the Internet is of regulation, commercialization, technological change, and a wide the Internet Protocol (IP). Sometimes called the “thin waist” range of policy concerns expressed at local, national, regional and of the IP stack, the IP layer provides the basic glue that international levels. In this paper, the effect of these forces is con- sidered and an attempt made to project their effects into the future. holds together the myriad networks of the Internet. It de- pends on a variety of other protocols to achieve this objec- Keywords—ARPA, BITNET, commercialization, Data net- tive, not the least being several alternative routing protocols working, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), domain names, European Academic Research Network (EARN), such as the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP and its varia- grid computing, history, information society, internationalized tions), Open Shortest Path First (OSPF), Internal System to domain names, Internet, Internet Corporation for Assigned Names Internet System (IS-IS), and the relatively basic Routing In- and Numbers (ICANN), Internet economics, Internet gover- formation Protocol (RIP). nance, Internet telephony, IP address space, IPv6, multiprotocol In its earliest incarnations, the layering of the IPs had label switching, NetNorth, packet radio, packet satellite, packet switching, protocols, regulation, security, standards, telecommuni- six layers beginning at the lowest level with the physical cations, X.25, virtual private network, Advanced Research Project layer (e.g., Ethernet, SONET, T1, etc.), moving “up stack” Agency (ARPA), U.S. Department of Defense. through link (e.g., High Level Data Link Control (HDLC), Point-to-Point Protocol, etc.), Network (e.g., frame relay, asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), MPLS), Internet (e.g., I. INTRODUCTION IP, Internet Control Message Protocol), transport (e.g., It is reasonable to ask what motivated the development Transmission Control Protocol, User Datagram Protocol), of the Internet. In the early 1970s, one had little choice in utility (e.g., File Transfer Protocol, Real Time Protocol, networking. If one wanted to network computers from a par- Simple Mail Transport Protocol, Post Office Protocol, Hy- ticular vendor (e.g., IBM, Digital Equipment Corporation), pertext Transport Protocol), and application layers (e.g., one used networking technology that was proprietary to the e-mail clients, Web browsers, instant messaging clients). vendor. IBM developed its Systems Network Architecture Subsequent formulations, some based on the seven-layer (SNA),1 and Digital Equipment Corporation developed Open Systems Interconnection Model, incorporated the DECNET.2 The U.S. Defense Department, having shown the Internet layer in the network layer; some dropped the utility layer; some added session and/or presentation layers. Manuscript received November 23, 2003; revised April 7, 2004. The original Internet design layered the IP on top of net- The author is with MCI, Inc., Ashburn, VA 20147 USA. work layers implemented in ARPANET, the ARPA Packet Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JPROC.2004.832974 Radio Network and the ARPA Atlantic Packet Satellite Net- 1[Online]. Available: http://www.yale.edu/pclt/COMM/SNA.HTM work [1]. These systems were packet switching networks that 2[Online]. Available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DECnet encapsulated Internet packets as payload in their own packet 0018-9219/04$20.00 © 2004 IEEE 1360 PROCEEDINGS OF THE IEEE, VOL. 92, NO. 9, SEPTEMBER 2004 formats and routed the resulting ensemble to the next Internet France. The academic BITNET5 emerged from academic gateway leading to the next network or to a destination host. networking of IBM mainframes and in part in response As gateways became commercialized by pioneering compa- to the limited community of ARPANET players. BITNET nies such as Proteon3 and Cisco Systems,4 these devices came used remote network job submission (NJE) as a means of to be called routers because they operated on Internet packets moving data from one machine to another. Out of this effort and had to participate in protocols to propagate routing infor- emerged a robust e-mail list server system called LISTSERV mation at the IP level. As routers became the most common and interactive chat capabilities, among many other things. devices for implementing parts of the Internet, the notion of BITNET users were linked to Internet users via e-mail, an underlying network diminished in favor of point-to-point generally. BITNET had a European counterpart called the or local area net links connecting the routers. European Academic Research Network (EARN),6 a Cana- When frame relay and ATM networks emerged, they were dian counterpart, NetNorth, and a Japanese counterpart, referred to as layer 2 networks, augmenting the notion of AsiaNet, in Japan. BITNET was started in 1981, with its link layer with switching capability. Connections between other counterparts emerging later. At its peak, BITNET was the edge points of these networks were implemented as vir- a globe-girdling system, but membership began to decline tual circuits. More recently, a system called multiprotocol in 1993 as the commercial Internet and other academic label switching (MPLS) has been developed which supports networks overtook the BITNET technology. traffic-engineering requirements for IP networks and also, Almost in parallel was the USENET,7 based on the through stacking of labels, permits the creation of multiple UNIX-to-UNIX Copy Program (UUCP), USENET emerged virtual networks riding on top of the MPLS substrate. in 1981 as a kind of grassroots networking initiative based on The distinction between layers is somewhat blurred in the spread of the UNIX operating system. Out of this effort these designs because the routing information needed to came the Net News service with its unique method of prop- manage the MPLS substrate uses the same BGP as is used agating information to many parties subscribing to different to support the IP layer. To make things even more complex, “feeds” associated with a huge variety of topics. Users could BGP itself relies on IP and the transport layer Transmission inject, comment upon and subscribe to specific topic areas, Control Protocol (TCP) for its implementation. creating vast communities of users with mutual interest in a What is important to note about the architecture of the variety of topics. One of the founders of USENET went on Internet is that the applications are far removed from the to create a company, UUNET, that eventually became the underlying transmission media. The IP separates the lower operator of the largest Internet backbone. Today it is a part levels from the upper levels. In effect, the Internet layer of MCI. is agnostic as to what means is used to transport Internet All of these networking systems were ultimately intercon- packets and is also agnostic as to what is carried in the nected with the Internet. and as the Internet continued to payload of each Internet packet. A consequence of this ag- spread, these services were layered on top of the increasingly nosticism is that the Internet is capable of carrying virtually ubiquitous TCP/IP protocols. any digital content, including sound, voice, video, images, Evolution of telecommunications industry may be text, and so on. The implication is that services such as compared on several points to plate tectonics. While the radio, television, and print publications can be transported concept of plate tectonics8 is now a well-accepted fact, it is through the Internet, assuming appropriate end-to-end trans- usually associated with very slow movement. The telecom mission capacity. In many cases, these and related services industry is in the midst of a more cataclysmic change, but do not require real-time support. For example, it is perfectly in some sense it is fair to compare the forces producing reasonable to transfer a high definition video as a kind of these changes to the kind of inevitability we associate with file transfer over the Internet, to be viewed at a later time. Of geological plate tectonics. These irresistible forces include course, if the available data rate is low, “later” may be a long technological change, regulation, commercial development, time. While real-time support for high quality video requires and policy evolution. While the combined effects of these megabits per second, good quality audio can be carried in forces cannot be predicted with precision, it seems fair to try tens of kilobits per second. The latter puts audio services to assess their near-term effects.