Internetworking
- See also: Development of the Internet
- See also: Internet architecture
- See also: Internet Protocol Suite
The Internet is a term with many meanings, depending on the context of its use [1]. To the general public in 1990, the term is often used synonymously with the World Wide Web, its best-known application.[2], although there are many other applications in active public use. But the internet supports many other applications, such as electronic mail, streaming media, such as internet radio and video, a large percentage of telephone traffic, system monitoring and real-time control applications, to name a few. Prior to the Web, electronic mail and file transfer were the major applications.
In one respect the Internet is similar to an iceberg. The vast majority of it is out of sight. While these distributed applications allow users to utilize internet services, in the context of convergence of communications, they require a large suite of technologies visible only to the enterprises that provide them.
To Internet Service Providers, the Internet identifies these underlying services. Some of these internet services that are accessible to the general public, while the same technologies providing similar services are available in restricted environments, such as those in an enterprise intranet, in military and government private internets and in local home networks. Further complicating the notion of an Internet is is the frequent interconnection of public and private networks in ways that allow limited interaction.
This article uses the term Internet in the broadest sense. That is, it identifies the applications that provide an interface between users and communications services, those services themselves, public and private instances of application and communications services and the aggregation of private and public networks into a global communications and application resource.
The history of the Internet
The development of the internet shows it as the culmination of significant activity in both the commercial world as well as within government sponsored programs. While the main development occurred in the United States, there were major contributions from researchers and engineers in the U.K., France and other parts of Europe. This work led to the existing architectural model.
The architecture of the Internet
In order to engineer the internet, internet designers and engineers place its services into one of several layers, which in total comprise the internet protocol architecture[3]. Internet architectural experts deprecate an overemphasis on layering; the more important principles of Internet architecture include:
- End-to-End Principle: Application intelligence is at the edge of the cloud; there have been variations on this principle.
- Robustness principle: "Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you receive."
While there have been several different protocol architecture designs, the one with the strongest support consists of 4 layers: 1) the application layer, 2) the transport layer, 3) the internet layer, and 4) the link/interface layer.[4]. Each protocol layer utilizes the services of the next lower layer
- ↑ Comer, Douglas E. title = Computer Networks and Internets (2009). {{{title}}}. Upper Saddle River, NJ isbn = 978-0-13-606127-3: Pearson Prentice-Hall.
- ↑ Okin, J. R. (2005), The Information Revolution: The Not-for-dummies Guide to the History, Technology, And Use of the World Wide Web, Winter Harbor, ME: Ironbound Press, ISBN 0-9763857-4-0
- ↑ RFC 1958: Architectural Principles of the Internet, Internet Engineering Task Force, June 1996. Retrieved on Sept. 17, 2009
- ↑ Template:Ciation