THE DESIGN PHILOSOPHY OF THE DARPA INTERNET PROTOCOLS

The paper outlined and prioritized the original design goals for the early Internet architecture. The main focus "was to develop an effective technique for multiplexed utilization of existing interconnected networks", mostly referring to survivability, service and network poly-morphism.

1. Internet communication must continue despite loss of networks or gateways.
2. The Internet must support multiple types of communications service.
3. The Internet architecture must accommodate a variety of networks.
4. The Internet architecture must permit distributed management of its resources.
5. The Internet architecture must be cost effective.
6. The Internet architecture must permit host attachment with a low level of effort.
7. The resources used in the internet architecture must be accountable.

I personally like this paper. The paper shows in details the architecture chosen that is related to each of the design goals. I think the paper should stay in the reading list. It gives a lot of historical facts and perspective. It gives me continuity in terms of learning about why some of the networking design are the way they are.

Toward the end, it basically advocates for datagram as the more popular and useful transport because it allows greater flexibility and efficiency. This is a "most-likely" conclusion that can be drawn from the end-to-end arguments (especially since the two papers came from the same author, David Clark).