Internet & Networking Architecture

NTERNET ARCHITECTURE

INTRODUCTION :

The Internet is a rather loose assemblage of individual networks; there is little in the way of overall administration.

The individual networks are owned by a huge number of independent operators. Some of these are major corporations with large, high-capacitynetworks; others are private individuals operating tiny networks of two or three computers their homes. Between them these networksemploy just about every networking technology yet invented. The great strength of the Internet is that it allows these diverse networks toact together to provide a single global network service.

The interactions between a network and its neighbors are, in essence, both simple and robust. This makes for easy extendibility andfuelled the early growth of the Internet. New participants needed only to come to an agreement with an existing operator and set upsome fairly simple equipment to become full players. This was in great contrast to the situation within the world of telephone networks,where operators were mostly large and bureaucratic and where adding new interconnections required complex negotiation andconfiguration and, possibly, international treaties.

What is the Internet architecture?

It is by definition a meta-network, a constantly changing collection of thousands of individual networks intercommunicating with a common protocol.

The Internet's architecture is described in its name, a short from of the compound word "inter-networking". This architecture is based in the very specification of the standard TCP/IP protocol, designed to connect any two networks which may be very different in internal hardware, software, and technical design. Once two networks are interconnected, communication with TCP/IP is enabled end-to-end, so that any node on the Internet has the near magical ability to communicate with any other no matter where they are. This openness of design has enabled the Internet architecture to grow to a global scale.

In practice, the Internet technical architecture looks a bit like a multi-dimensional river system, with small tributaries feeding medium-sized streams feeding large rivers. For example, an individual's access to the Internet is often from home over a modem to a local Internet service provider who connects to a regional network connected to a national network. At the office, a desktop computer might be connected to a local area network with a company connection to a corporate Intranet connected to several national Internet service providers. In general, small local Internet service providers connect to medium-sized regional networks which connect to large national networks, which then connect to very large bandwidth networks on the Internet backbone.

Most Internet service providers have several redundant network cross-connections to other providers in order to ensure continuous availability. The companies running the Internet backbone operate very high bandwidth networks relied on by governments, corporations, large organizations, and other Internet service providers. Their technical infrastructure often includes global connections through underwater cables and satellite links to enable communication between countries and continents. As always, a larger scale introduces new phenomena: the number of packets flowing through the switches on the backbone is so large that it exhibits the kind of complex non-linear patterns usually found in natural, analog systems like the flow of water or development of the rings of Saturn.

Each communication packet goes up the hierarchy of Internet networks as far as necessary to get to its destination network where local routing takes over to deliver it to the addressee. In the same way, each level in the hierarchy pays the next level for the bandwidth they use, and then the large backbone companies settle up with each other. Bandwidth is priced by large Internet service providers by several methods, such as at a fixed rate for constant availability of a certain number of megabits per second, or by a variety of use methods that amount to a cost per gigabyte. Due to economies of scale and efficiencies in management, bandwidth cost drops dramatically at the higher levels of the architecture.
Resources :

The network topology page provides information and resources on the real-time construction of the Internet network, including graphs and statistics.

The following references provide additional information about the Internet architecture: Internet Architecture and Innovation

"Many people have a pragmatic attitude toward technology: they don't care how it works, they just want to use it. With regard to the Internet, this attitude is dangerous. As this book shows, different ways of structuring the Internet result in very different environments for its development, production, and use. If left to themselves, network providers will continue to change the internal structure of the Internet in ways that are good for them, but not necessarily for the rest of us — individual, organizational or corporate Internet users, application developers and content providers, and even those who do not use the Internet.

If we want to protect the Internet's usefulness, if we want to realize its full economic, social, cultural, and political potential, we need to understand the Internet's structure and what will happen if that structure is changed." The Internet's remarkable growth has been fueled by innovation. New applications continually enable new ways of using the Internet, and new physical networking technologies increase the range of networks over which the Internet can run. In this pathbreaking book, Barbara van Schewick argues that this explosion of innovation is not an accident, but a consequence of the Internet's architecture – a consequence of technical choices regarding the Internet's inner structure made early in its history. Building on insights from economics, management science, engineering, networking and law, van Schewick shows how alternative network architectures can create very different economic environments for innovation.

The Internet's original architecture was based on four design principles – modularity, layering, and two versions of the celebrated but often misunderstood end-to-end arguments. This design, van Schewick demonstrates, fostered innovation in applications and allowed applications like e-mail, the World Wide Web, E-Bay, Google, Skype, Flickr, Blogger and Facebook to emerge.

Today, the Internet's architecture is changing in ways that deviate from the Internet's original design principles. These changes remove the features that fostered innovation in the past. They reduce the amount and quality of application innovation and limit users' ability to use the Internet as they see fit. They threaten the Internet's ability to spur economic growth, to improve democratic discourse, and to provide a decentralized environment for social and cultural interaction in which anyone can participate. While public interests suffer, network providers – who control the evolution of the network – benefit from the changes, making it highly unlikely that they will change course without government intervention.

Given this gap between network providers' private interests and the public's interests, van Schewick argues, we face an important choice. Leaving the evolution of the network to network providers will significantly reduce the Internet's value to society. If no one intervenes, network providers' interests will drive networks further away from the original design principles. With this dynamic, doing nothing will not preserve the status quo, let alone restore the innovative potential of the Internet. If the Internet's value for society is to be preserved, policymakers will have to intervene and protect the features that were at the core of the Internet's success. It is on all of us to make this happen.

Networking architecture

Computer networking must sound very familiar term as it is now very much adopted by every one. It started ages ago; the original concept was to connect two separate computers with each other for communications.

This concept was commercially adopted by most of computer users, Institutions, schools, IT departments with in the decay and networking of computers got very popular compulsion On the broader scale computers networking is collection of multiple computers, printers, scanners and other devices to communicate and share information with each other. Sharing files, software etc can not be possible without the concept of networking; networks have made lives easier for many people in their professions. One can command the computer to print the document out without even sitting on it. Computers are every where now it is the must have machine in every field of profession. If you have more than one computer at your place having it networked is as important and useful as having computer it self.

In this section of tutorials and articles we will teach you what computer networks are, what are computer network types?

Which network type is best used for which approach, hardware requirement, advantages, software requirement, computer network security ?. There are as many as eight types with which comptuer networks can be formed, most commonly used is

• LAN, Local Area Networks ,
• WAN , Wide area network,
• MAN, Metropolitan Area Network.

Read about more Comptuer Network types Local Area Network (LAN) is technical name for computer networks which is normally developed among a single house,office etc. Immense work is done on networking by networking device manufacturers and it is still going on, every now an then there is new and better solution to network multiple computers.

LAN is been implemented and been replaced by WLAN already, WLAN is wireless local area network which performs same function as LAN does but wirelessly. LAN however is still used and understanding it is very important before moving to better and enhance solutions. Browse through the navigation towards your left which will help you understand the entire concept involving deployment of computer networks and that should be able to help you build your very own local area network.

Wide Area Network, (WAN) Wide area network is communication amoung computers which are located far from each other. Internet is one classic example of WAN, It is the collection of large number of computers connecting togather to share information with each other and accesible from every where.

Metropolitan Area Network (MAN) Man is not used as commonly as WAN and LAN networks are, it posses its importance when it comes to connect two offices or organization remotly located togather to build networks among computing systems. It covers large area but not as much as WAN is capable of.

This page contains very basic information on computer networking. However we havetried our best to provide you all relevant articles on computer networking with which it should be easy to form computer networks without editional help. You can go through different articles on left menu, follow the steps and you should be able to sticks hands to forming computer networks. network communication design in which the physical components of computers are arranged in a sequence so that they can communicate with each other. Network is a combination of hosts, applications, routers, hardware, software and links of media. Network architecture is a guideline and technology for designing building and managing a network.
Purpose of Network Architecture

The purpose of network architecture is to provide assistance and guidance to implement high quality network. The network architecture not only helps you to deploy the network but also assists you in troubleshoot and maintaining architecture. Network architecture also helps you security management and disaster recovery.

Network architecture is composed of many layers. In the process of layering the communication tasks are divided into smaller parts, each part is further divided into sub tasks for accomplishing tasks. These subtasks interact with the other communication processes. The process of layering keeps the network design simple. There are many ways to design and set network architecture.

There are many choices available to set up a network however every network must have three basic parts like network users, applications and devices. Network itself is operating at physical layer of the OSI model. The devices are operating mostly at data link layer or network layer. The application exists at the session layer of the OSI model. Lastly the user is at the last two layers of the model including presentation and application layer

The Network Topologies

The network topologies play an important role in the formation of a network. Network architecture designs closely related to design of the network topology. There are many types of network topologies like star topology, bus topology, ring topology, mesh and tree topology. The choice of network topology is dependent upon the type and size of network architecture. Most commonly used network topology is mesh. However the application of topology depends upon the amount of space in which one has to establish network architecture. The network architecture which comprises of ten to twelve computers mostly is designed on using bus topology as a network. In a bus topology an array of computer terminals is connected to one after the other computer and a network is established. In order to establish larger networks Mesh topology is used. Mesh network architecture is a complex design and it involves the redundancy of interconnections attached to the routers and switches in a network.

Components of Network Architecture

There are six basic network architecture components such as servers, proxies, clients, command consoles, server modules and cores. The server is the backbone of any network. The role of servers in network architecture is to communicate with proxies and other peered servers. They are at the top layer of the network and they do not communicate directly with client. Moreover servers receive complete projects and tasks .proxies can be termed as the focal point of the network because it facilitates the communication of the devices. Proxies usually perform buffering and they also communicate with the others of its type to share the loads of the network.

The client systems are the workers of the network. They receive tasks, they interact with the users and they perform user applications. Command consoles are the network guidelines which provide assistance to users about how to control the authorize network nodes. The core is the real work done in the system. The cores are verified within the network and with the clients to prevent bad cores. Server modules handle the particular tasks of the server. Server module is generally registered with the server libraries; this would help the server to perform the needed task.