International Network Working Group

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The International Network Working Group (INWG) was a group of prominent computer science researchers in the 1970s who studied and developed standards and protocols for interconnection of computer networks. Set up in 1972 as an informal group to consider the technical issues involved in connecting different networks, its goal was to develop an international standard protocol for internetworking. INWG became a subcommittee of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) the following year. Concepts developed by members of the group contributed to the Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication proposed by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in 1974 and the Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) that emerged later.

Contents

History

Founding and IFIP affiliation

The International Network Working Group was formed by Steve Crocker, Louis Pouzin, Donald Davies, and Peter Kirstein in June 1972 in Paris at a networking conference organised by Pouzin. [1] [2] Crocker saw that it would be useful to have an international version of the Network Working Group, which developed the Network Control Program for the ARPANET. [3]

At the International Conference on Computer Communication (ICCC) in Washington D.C. in October 1972, Vint Cerf was approved as INWG's Chair on Crocker's recommendation. [4] [5] [6] [nb 1] The group included American researchers representing the ARPANET [nb 2] and the Merit network, the French CYCLADES and RCP networks, [nb 3] and British teams working on the NPL network, EPSS, and European Informatics Network. [4] [7]

During early 1973, Pouzin arranged affiliation with the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP). INWG became IFIP Working Group 1 under Technical Committee 6 (Data Communication) with the title "International Packet Switching for Computer Sharing" (WG6.1). This standing, although informal, enabled the group to provide technical input on packet networking to CCITT and ISO. [4] [6] [8] [9] [10] Its purpose was to study and develop "international standard protocols for internetworking". [11]

INWG published a series numbered notes, some of which were also RfCs. [4] [12]

Gateways/routers

The idea for a router (called a gateway at the time) initially came about through INWG. [13] These gateway devices were different from most previous packet switching schemes in two ways. First, they connected dissimilar kinds of networks, such as serial lines and local area networks. Second, they were connectionless devices, which had no role in assuring that traffic was delivered reliably, leaving that function entirely to the hosts. [14] This particular idea, the end-to-end principle, had been pioneered in the CYCLADES network. [15]

Proposal for an international end-to-end protocol

INWG met in New York in June 1973. Attendees included Cerf, Bob Kahn, Alex McKenzie, Bob Metcalfe, Roger Scantlebury, John Shoch and Hubert Zimmermann, among others. [4] [16] [17] [18] They discussed a first draft of an International Transmission Protocol (ITP). [4] Zimmermann and Metcalfe dominated the discussions; Zimmermann had been working with Pouzin on the CYCLADES network while Metclafe, Shoch and others at Xerox PARC had been developing the idea of Ethernet and the PARC Universal Packet (PUP) for internetworking. [19] [16] Notes from the meetings were recorded by Cerf and McKenzie, which was circulated after the meeting (INWG 28). [4] [12] There was a follow-up meeting in July. Gerard LeLann and G. Grossman made contributions after the June meeting. [4]

Building on this work, in September 1973, Kahn and Cerf presented a paper, Host and Process Level Protocols for Internetwork Communication, at the next INWG meeting at the University of Sussex in England (INWG 39). [20] Their ideas were refined further in long discussions with Davies, Scantlebury, Pouzin and Zimmerman. [21]

Pouzin circulated a paper on Interconnection of Packet Switching Networks in October 1973 (INWG 42), [4] [12] in which he introduced the term catenet for an interconnected network. [4] [22] Zimmerman and Michel Elie wrote a Proposed Standard Host-Host Protocol for Heterogenous Computer Networks: Transport Protocol in December 1973 (INWG 43). [23] Pouzin updated his paper with A Proposal for Interconnecting Packet Switching Networks in March 1974 (INWG 60), [12] published two months later in May. [24] Zimmerman and Elie circulated a Standard host-host protocol for heterogeneous computer networks in April 1974 (INWG 61). [12] Pouzin published An integrated approach to network protocols in May 1975. [25]

Kahn and Cerf published a significantly updated and refined version of their proposal in May 1974, A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication. A later version of the paper acknowledged several people including members of INWG and attendees at the June 1973 meeting. [26] It was updated in INWG 72/RFC 675 in December 1974 by Cerf, Yogen Dalal and Carl Sunshine, which introduced the term internet as a shorthand for internetwork. [27]

The Internet architecture as seen by the INWG. INWG-arch.png
The Internet architecture as seen by the INWG.

Two competing proposals had evolved, [29] the early Transmission Control Program (TCP), originally proposed by Kahn and Cerf, and the CYCLADES transport station (TS) protocol, proposed by Pouzin, Zimmermann and Elie. There were two sticking points: whether there should be fragmentation of datagrams (as in TCP) or standard-sized datagrams (as in TS); and whether the data flow was an undifferentiated stream or maintained the integrity of the units sent. These were not major differences. After "hot debate", McKenzie proposed a synthesis in December 1974, Internetwork Host-to-Host Protocol (INWG 74), which he refined the following year with Cerf, Scantlebury and Zimmerman (INWG 96). [4] [19] [28] [30]

After reaching agreement with the wider group, [nb 4] a Proposal for an international end to end protocol, was published by Cerf, McKenzie, Scantlebury, and Zimmermann in 1976. [31] [32] [33] It was presented to the CCITT and ISO by Derek Barber, who became INWG chair earlier that year. [4] Although the protocol was adopted by networks in Europe, [34] it was not adopted by the CCITT, ISO nor the ARPANET. [4]

The CCITT went on to adopt the X.25 standard in 1976, based on virtual circuits. ARPA began testing TCP in 1975 at Stanford, BBN and University College London. [35] Ultimately, ARPA developed the Internet protocol suite, including the Internet Protocol as connectionless layer and the Transmission Control Protocol as a reliable connection-oriented service, which reflects concepts in Pouzin's CYCLADES project. [36]

Email

Ray Tomlinson is well known as the creator of network mail (i.e., email) in INWG Protocol note 2 (a separate series of INWG notes), in September 1974. [4] Derek Barber proposed an electronic mail protocol in 1979 in INWG 192 and implemented it on the European Informatics Network. [37] This was referenced by Jon Postel in his early work on Internet email, published in the Internet Experiment Note series. [38]

Later

Alex McKenzie served as chair from 1979-1982 and Secretary beginning in 1983. [11] Carl Sunshine, who had worked with Vint Cerf and Yogen Dalal at Stanford on the first TCP specification, subsequently served as INWG chair until 1987, when Harry Rudin took over. [39]

Later international work led to the OSI model in 1984, of which many members of the INWG became advocates. [5] [40] During the Protocol Wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s, engineers, organizations and nations became polarized over the issue of which standard, the OSI model or the Internet protocol suite would result in the best and most robust computer networks. ARPA partnerships with the telecommunication and computer industry led to widespread private sector adoption of the Internet protocol suite as a communication protocol. [5] [41] [42]

The INWG continued to work on protocol design and formal specification until the 1990s when it disbanded as the Internet grew rapidly. [4] Nonetheless, issues with the Internet Protocol suite remain and alternatives have been proposed building on INWG ideas such as Recursive Internetwork Architecture. [28]

Legacy

The work of INWG was a significant step in the creation of the Transmission Control Program and ultimately the Internet. [43]

... the International Network Working Group was created ... to draw a larger cohort of people into this whole question of how to design and build packet switch networks. That eventually led to the design of the Internet.

— Vint Cerf (2020) [44]

Members

The group had about 100 members, including the following: [4] [9]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Crocker recalls he allocated Cerf $50k funding for the role, although Kahn does not recall this.
  2. ↑ More specifically, McKenzie represented BBN and Cerf represented Stanford University.
  3. ↑ Remi Despres, who represented the French RCP, was also a member.
  4. ↑ The group did not include Bob Kahn.

Related Research Articles

Internetworking is the practice of interconnecting multiple computer networks, such that any pair of hosts in the connected networks can exchange messages irrespective of their hardware-level networking technology. The resulting system of interconnected networks is called an internetwork, or simply an internet.

The Internet Protocol (IP) is the network layer communications protocol in the Internet protocol suite for relaying datagrams across network boundaries. Its routing function enables internetworking, and essentially establishes the Internet.

The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suite are the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), and the Internet Protocol (IP). Early versions of this networking model were known as the Department of Defense (DoD) model because the research and development were funded by the United States Department of Defense through DARPA.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Steve Crocker</span> American computer scientist and Internet pioneer (born 1944)

Stephen D. Crocker is an American Internet pioneer. In 1969, he created the ARPA "Network Working Group" and the Request for Comments series. He served as chair of the board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from 2011 through 2017.

A datagram is a basic transfer unit associated with a packet-switched network. Datagrams are typically structured in header and payload sections. Datagrams provide a connectionless communication service across a packet-switched network. The delivery, arrival time, and order of arrival of datagrams need not be guaranteed by the network.

In telecommunications, packet switching is a method of grouping data into short messages in fixed format, i.e. packets, that are transmitted over a digital network. Packets are made of a header and a payload. Data in the header is used by networking hardware to direct the packet to its destination, where the payload is extracted and used by an operating system, application software, or higher layer protocols. Packet switching is the primary basis for data communications in computer networks worldwide.

The end-to-end principle is a design framework in computer networking. In networks designed according to this principle, guaranteeing certain application-specific features, such as reliability and security, requires that they reside in the communicating end nodes of the network. Intermediary nodes, such as gateways and routers, that exist to establish the network, may implement these to improve efficiency but cannot guarantee end-to-end correctness.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ARPANET</span> Early packet switching network (1969–1990)

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. The ARPANET was established by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Kahn (computer scientist)</span> American computer scientist and Internet pioneer (born 1938)

Bob Kahn is an American electrical engineer who, along with Vint Cerf, first proposed the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), the fundamental communication protocols at the heart of the Internet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Donald Davies</span> Welsh computer scientist and Internet pioneer (1924–2000)

Donald Watts Davies, was a Welsh computer scientist and Internet pioneer who was employed at the UK National Physical Laboratory (NPL).

The CYCLADES computer network was a French research network created in the early 1970s. It was one of the pioneering networks experimenting with the concept of packet switching and, unlike the ARPANET, was explicitly designed to facilitate internetworking.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Louis Pouzin</span> French computer scientist and Internet pioneer (born 1931)

Louis Pouzin is a French computer scientist and Internet pioneer. He directed the development of the CYCLADES computer network in France the early 1970s, which implemented a novel design for packet communication. He was the first to implement the end-to-end principle in a wide-area network, which became fundamental to the design of the Internet.

Hubert Zimmermann was a French software engineer and a pioneering figure in computer networking.

Peter Thomas Kirstein was a British computer scientist who played a role in the creation of the Internet. He made the first internetworking connection on the ARPANET in 1973, by providing a link to British academic networks, and was instrumental in defining and implementing TCP/IP alongside Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">NPL network</span> Historical network in England pioneering packet switching

The NPL network, or NPL Data Communications Network, was a local area computer network operated by a team from the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in London that pioneered the concept of packet switching.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SATNET</span> Early computer network that used satellite communication

SATNET, also known as the Atlantic Packet Satellite Network, was an early satellite network that formed an initial segment of the Internet. It was implemented by BBN Technologies under the direction of ARPA.

Roger Anthony Scantlebury is a British computer scientist and Internet pioneer who worked at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) and later at Logica.

The Protocol Wars were a long-running debate in computer science that occurred from the 1970s to the 1990s, when engineers, organizations and nations became polarized over the issue of which communication protocol would result in the best and most robust networks. This culminated in the Internet–OSI Standards War in the 1980s and early 1990s, which was ultimately "won" by the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) by the mid-1990s when it became the dominant protocol suite through rapid adoption of the Internet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Walden</span> American computer scientist (1942–2022)

David Corydon Walden was an American computer scientist and Internet pioneer who contributed to the engineering development of the ARPANET, a precursor of the modern Internet. He specifically contributed to the Interface Message Processor, which was the packet switching node for the ARPANET. Walden was a contributor to IEEE Computer Society's Annals of the History of Computing and was a member of the TeX Users Group.

References

  1. ↑ Pelkey, James. "8.3 CYCLADES Network and Louis Pouzin 1971–1972". Entrepreneurial Capitalism and Innovation: A History of Computer Communications 1968–1988.
  2. ↑ Hafner & Lyon 1999 , p.  222
  3. ↑ "Internet founders say flexible framework was key to explosive growth". Princeton University. Retrieved 2020-02-07.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 McKenzie, Alexander (2011). "INWG and the Conception of the Internet: An Eyewitness Account". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 33 (1): 66–71. doi:10.1109/MAHC.2011.9. ISSN   1934-1547. S2CID   206443072.
  5. 1 2 3 Andrew L. Russell (30 July 2013). "OSI: The Internet That Wasn't". IEEE Spectrum . Vol. 50, no. 8.
  6. 1 2 Abbate, Janet (2000). Inventing the Internet. MIT Press. pp. 123–4. ISBN   978-0-262-51115-5.
  7. ↑ "The Computer History Museum, SRI International, and BBN Celebrate the 40th Anniversary of First ARPANET Transmission, Precursor to Today's Internet". SRI International. 27 October 2009. Archived from the original on March 29, 2019. Retrieved 25 September 2017. But the ARPANET itself had now become an island, with no links to the other networks that had sprung up. By the early 1970s, researchers in France, the UK, and the U.S. began developing ways of connecting networks to each other, a process known as internetworking.
  8. ↑ The "Hidden" Prehistory of European Research Networking. Trafford Publishing. ISBN   978-1-4669-3935-6.
  9. 1 2 Davies, Donald Watts (1979). Computer networks and their protocols. Internet Archive. Chichester, [Eng.] ; New York : Wiley. p. 466. ISBN   9780471997504.
  10. ↑ "Vinton Cerf : How the Internet Came to Be". www.netvalley.com. Retrieved 2021-12-22.
  11. 1 2 "Collection: Alex McKenzie collection of computer networking development records | University of Minnesota Archival Collections Guides". archives.lib.umn.edu. Retrieved 2023-01-27.
  12. 1 2 3 4 5 "General Notes index: 1-77, 98-111, 116-125 citing note number, author, and title; INWG Protocol Notes index: 1-10, 28-38 citing note number, author, title and date". umedia.lib.umn.edu. Retrieved 2024-05-29.
  13. ↑ Davies, Shanks, Heart, Barker, Despres, Detwiler and Riml, "Report of Subgroup 1 on Communication System", INWG Note No. 1.
  14. ↑ Edmondson-Yurkanan, Chris (2007). "SIGCOMM's archaeological journey into networking's past". Communications of the ACM. 50 (5): 63–68. doi:10.1145/1230819.1230840. ISSN   0001-0782. INWG#1: Report of Subgroup 1 on Communication System Requirements by Davies, Shanks, Heart, Barker, Despres, Detwiler, and Riml. They wrote: "It was agreed that interworkingbetween packet switching networks should not add complications to the hosts, considering that networks will probably be different and thus gatewaysbetween networks will be required. These gateways should be as uncomplicated as possible, whilst allowing as much freedom as possible for the design of individual networks". INWG#1 clarified that gateways and simplicity were accepted concepts when INWG was formed.
  15. ↑ Bennett, Richard (September 2009). "Designed for Change: End-to-End Arguments, Internet Innovation, and the Net Neutrality Debate" (PDF). Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. pp. 7, 11. Retrieved 11 September 2017.
  16. 1 2 Taylor, Bob (October 11, 2008), "Oral History of Robert (Bob) W. Taylor" (PDF), Computer History Museum Archive, CHM Reference number: X5059.2009: 27–8
  17. ↑ Isaacson, Walter (2014). The innovators : how a group of hackers, geniuses, and geeks created the digital revolution. Internet Archive. New York : Simon & Schuster. ISBN   978-1-4767-0869-0.
  18. ↑ "Smithsonian Oral and Video Histories: Vinton Cerf". National Museum of American History . Smithsonian Institution. 24 April 1990. Retrieved 23 September 2019. Roger Scantlebury was one of the major players. And Donald Davies who ran, at least he was superintendent of the information systems division or something like that. I absolutely had a lot of interaction with NPL at the time. They in fact came to the ICCC 72 and they had been coming to previous meetings of what is now called Datacomm. Its first incarnation was a long title having to do with the analysis and optimization of computer communication networks, or something like that. This started in late 1969, I think, was when the first meeting happened in Pine Hill, Georgia. I didn't go to that one, but I went to the next one that was at Stanford, I think. That's where I met Scantlebury, I believe, for the first time. Then I had a lot more interaction with him. I would come to the UK fairly regularly, partly for IFIP or INWG reasons
  19. 1 2 Russell, Andrew L.; Schafer, Valérie (2014). "In the Shadow of ARPANET and Internet: Louis Pouzin and the Cyclades Network in the 1970s". Technology and Culture. 55 (4): 893–894. doi:10.1353/tech.2014.0096. ISSN   0040-165X. JSTOR   24468474.
  20. ↑ Pelkey, James. "8.4 Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) 1973-1976". Entrepreneurial Capitalism and Innovation: A History of Computer Communications 1968–1988.
  21. ↑ Hafner, Katie; Lyon, Matthew (1999-08-19) [1996]. Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet. Simon and Schuster. pp. 225–6. ISBN   978-0-684-87216-2.
  22. ↑ Vint Cerf (July 1978). "IEN 48: The Catenet Model for Internetworking". IETF. The term "catenet" was introduced by L. Pouzin.
  23. ↑ "General Notes index: 1-77, 98-111, 116-125 citing note number, author, and title; INWG Protocol Notes index: 1-10, 28-38 citing note number, author, title and date". umedia.lib.umn.edu. Retrieved 2024-05-29.
  24. ↑ A Proposal for Interconnecting Packet Switching Networks, L. Pouzin, Proceedings of EUROCOMP, Brunel University, May 1974, pp. 1023-36.
  25. ↑ Pouzin, Louis (1975-05-19). "An integrated approach to network protocols". Proceedings of the May 19-22, 1975, national computer conference and exposition on - AFIPS '75. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 701–707. doi:10.1145/1499949.1500100. ISBN   978-1-4503-7919-9.
  26. ↑ Cerf, V.; Kahn, R. (1974). "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication" (PDF). IEEE Transactions on Communications. 22 (5): 637–648. doi:10.1109/TCOM.1974.1092259. ISSN   1558-0857. The authors wish to thank a number of colleagues for helpful comments during early discussions of international network protocols, especially R. Metcalfe, R. Scantlebury, D. Walden, and H. Zimmerman; D. Davies and L. Pouzin who constructively commented on the fragmentation and accounting issues; and S. Crocker who commented on the creation and destruction of associations.
  27. ↑ Specification of Internet Transmission Control Program. 1974. doi: 10.17487/RFC0675 . RFC 675.
  28. 1 2 3 J. Day. How in the Heck Do You Lose a Layer!? 2nd IFIP International Conference of the Network of the Future, Paris, France, 2011
  29. ↑ Russell, Andrew L. (2014). Open standards and the digital age: history, ideology, and networks. New York: Cambridge Univ Press. p. 196. ISBN   978-1107039193.
  30. ↑ Day, John (2007-12-27). Patterns in Network Architecture: A Return to Fundamentals (paperback): A Return to Fundamentals. Pearson Education. ISBN   978-0-13-270456-4.
  31. ↑ Cerf, V.; McKenzie, A; Scantlebury, R; Zimmermann, H (1976). "Proposal for an international end to end protocol". ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review. 6: 63–89. doi:10.1145/1015828.1015832. S2CID   36954091.
  32. ↑ Davies, Donald Watts (1979). Computer Networks and Their Protocols. Wiley. p. 468. ISBN   978-0-471-99750-4.
  33. ↑ Esmailzadeh, Riaz (2016-03-04). Broadband Telecommunications Technologies and Management. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN   978-1-118-99565-5.
  34. ↑ "Hubert Zimmerman". www.historyofcomputercommunications.info. Retrieved 2020-08-27.
  35. ↑ by Vinton Cerf, as told to Bernard Aboba (1993). "How the Internet Came to Be" . Retrieved 27 November 2022. We began doing concurrent implementations at Stanford, BBN, and University College London. So effort at developing the Internet protocols was international from the beginning.
  36. ↑ "The internet's fifth man". Economist. 13 December 2013. Retrieved 11 September 2017. In the early 1970s Mr Pouzin created an innovative data network that linked locations in France, Italy and Britain. Its simplicity and efficiency pointed the way to a network that could connect not just dozens of machines, but millions of them. It captured the imagination of Dr Cerf and Dr Kahn, who included aspects of its design in the protocols that now power the internet.
  37. ↑ Barber, D., and J. Laws, "A Basic Mail Scheme for EIN," INWG 192, February 1979.
  38. ↑ IEN 85.
  39. ↑ Sunshine, Carl (January 1987). "IFIP WG 6.1 Newsletter 87/1". umedia.lib.umn.edu. Retrieved 2024-07-09.
  40. ↑ Sunshine, Carl A., ed. (1989). "A Brief History of Computer Networking". Computer network architectures and protocols. Applications of communications theory (2nd ed.). New York: Plenum Press. pp. 3–6. ISBN   978-0-306-43189-0.
  41. ↑ Russell, Andrew L. "Rough Consensus and Running Code' and the Internet-OSI Standards War" (PDF). IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.
  42. ↑ Davies, Howard; Bressan, Beatrice (2010-04-26). A History of International Research Networking: The People who Made it Happen. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN   978-3-527-32710-2.
  43. ↑ Hempstead, C.; Worthington, W., eds. (2005). Encyclopedia of 20th-Century Technology. Vol. 1, A–L. Routledge. p. 574. ISBN   9781135455514. The network research community formed the [International] Network Working Group (INWG) ... and out of this came the ... transmission control protocol/internet protocol (TCP/IP)
  44. ↑ "Vinton G. Cerf : An Oral History". Stanford Oral History Collections - Spotlight at Stanford. 2020. p. 84. Retrieved 2024-06-29.

Primary sources

In chronological order:

Further reading

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