Fate-sharing

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Fate-sharing is an engineering design philosophy where related parts of a system are yoked together, so that they either fail together or not at all. Fate-sharing is an example of the end-to-end principle. The term "fate-sharing" was defined by David D. Clark in his 1988 paper "The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols" as follows:

The end-to-end principle is a design framework in computer networking. In networks designed according to this principle, application-specific features reside in the communicating end nodes of the network, rather than in intermediary nodes, such as gateways and routers, that exist to establish the network.

David D. Clark American computer scientist

David Dana "Dave" Clark is an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer who has been involved with Internet developments since the mid-1970s. He currently works as a Senior Research Scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

The fate-sharing model suggests that it is acceptable to lose the state information associated with an entity if, at the same time, the entity itself is lost. Specifically, information about transport level synchronization is stored in the host which is attached to the net and using its communication service.

A good example of fate-sharing is the transmission of routing messages in routing protocols such as BGP, where the failure of a link or link interface automatically has the effect of terminating routing announcements through that interface, ultimately resulting in the tearing down of the state for that route at each end of the link. Similar considerations apply to TCP.

A routing protocol specifies how routers communicate with each other, distributing information that enables them to select routes between any two nodes on a computer network. Routers perform the "traffic directing" functions on the Internet; data packets are forwarded through the networks of the internet from router to router until they reach their destination computer. Routing algorithms determine the specific choice of route. Each router has a prior knowledge only of networks attached to it directly. A routing protocol shares this information first among immediate neighbors, and then throughout the network. This way, routers gain knowledge of the topology of the network. The ability of routing protocols to dynamically adjust to changing conditions such as disabled data lines and computers and route data around obstructions is what gives the Internet its survivability and reliability.

The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) is one of the main protocols of the Internet protocol suite. It originated in the initial network implementation in which it complemented the Internet Protocol (IP). Therefore, the entire suite is commonly referred to as TCP/IP. TCP provides reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery of a stream of octets (bytes) between applications running on hosts communicating via an IP network. Major internet applications such as the World Wide Web, email, remote administration, and file transfer rely on TCP. Applications that do not require reliable data stream service may use the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), which provides a connectionless datagram service that emphasizes reduced latency over reliability.

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