Data-Oriented And Conection-Oriended Networking

16 Pages 3953 Words

-oriented.

The Internet is moving away from a connection-oriented model and
becoming more data-oriented. Since the original Internet design was
modeled, at least loosely, after a telephone system, all of its
original protocols were connection-oriented. Increasingly, we're
becoming aware that often a user is not interested in connecting to
such-and-such a computer, but rather in retrieving a specific piece of
data. Since such operations are so common, Internet architects need
to recognize the distinction between connection-oriented and
data-oriented operations and design networks to support both well.
Data-oriented models will not replace connection-oriented models;
sometimes, you'll still want to make the telephone call. Rather, the
pros and cons of each need to be understand, so both can be
incorporated into the Internet of the 21st century.

To understand the emergence of data-oriented networking, it is useful
to consider the historical development of the Internet. Initially,
the driving application for what became the Internet was email,
allowing virtually instantaneous communications over large distances,
FTP and TELNET were second and third. FTP provided file transfer and
a rudimentary publication system; TELNET extended the 1970s command
line interface over the network, letting people "log in" over the net,
thus allowing remote use and management of computer systems.

Even in these early years of the Internet, the network was becoming
more data-oriented than a cursory examination of its protocols would
suggest. FTP archive sites, such as uunet and wuarchive, began
assembling collections of useful data, including programs, protocol
documents, and mailing list archives in central locations. Other
sites began mirroring the archives, so that retrieving a particular
program, for example, did not require a connection to a centralized
server for the program, but only a connection to a convenient m...