Networking
by Mark Allman
The Internet is becoming inundated. Inundated with new users.
Inundated with information. Inundated with traffic. And considering
that it was never meant to support the glut of information and users,
this vast network has performed fairly well. Yet the solutions now
employed will most likely not scale well for much longer at the
current growth rate.
As new tools have been developed which make "surfing the net" very
easy, the Internet has rapidly changed from a network connecting
scientists and engineers to a network connecting everyone. Email
addresses are as common as fax machines with the advent of the
``Information Superhighway.'' The designers of the original Internet
could not possibly have foreseen the current success of their creation
or the myriad of purposes that it's being used for now (and will be
used in the future). Scott Ruthfield takes us on a ride through the
development of the network in ``The Internet's
History and Development:
From Wartime Tool to the Fish-Cam.''
The Multicast Backbone
The Internet has become a way for people in different geographic areas
to collaborate on projects easily. People have been using email for
this purpose for years. But working with others over the network is
getting even easier with the use of the Multicast Backbone. The MBONE
provides an efficient way for people to use real time audio and video
to communicate. In ``The MBONE -- The
Internet's Other Backbone,'' Jay
A. Kreibich introduces the concept of ``IP multicasting,'' as well as
the applications which currently use it.
Security
The point of connecting to a network is to communicate and share data
with others who are also connected. But this has its drawbacks.
Connecting a host or a network to the Internet means making it
accessible to the world. This opens up the machine to possible break
ins. This has been a very large issue for some companies, as they try
to attach to the Internet. In his
article, ``Network Security, Filters and
Firewalls,'' Darren Bolding illustrates some of the ways in which
networks are being ``secured.''
Harvest
As the Internet grows, so does the amount of information being made
available. Finding the information you want can be hard or nearly
impossible in some cases. Additionally, if the information you are
looking for is popular, and easily found, chances are that the server
providing the information is heavily loaded and you will have a hard
time obtaining it. The ``Harvest'' system for
information discovery can
help ease both of these problems. In her article, ``Harvest,'' Sarah
Elizabeth Burcham describes this system and compares it to
other information indexing systems.
FoxNet
Finally, as the Internet has become more heavily used, the importance
of having efficiently implemented network protocols becomes clear.
The FoxNet research project is attempting to do just that by
implementing network protocols in SML. In ``The Fox
Project: A
Language-Structured Approach to Networking Software,'' Jeremy Buhler
offers a guided tour of the FoxNet project.
Copyright 1995 by Mark Alman
Crossroads 2.1 September 1995
Last Modified:
Location: www.acm.org/crossroads/xrds2-1/intro.html