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What is Internet Architecture?
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-capacity
networks; others are private individuals operating tiny
networks of two or three computers their homes. Between
them these networks employ just about every networking
technology yet invented. The great strength of the Internet is
that it allows these diverse networks to act together to
provide a single global network service.
The interactions between a network and its neighbours are,
in essence, both simple and robust. This makes for easy
extendibility and fuelled the early growth of the Internet.
New participants needed only to come to an agreement with
an existing operator and set up some 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

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and configuration 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

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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, analogy 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.

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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

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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 fuelled 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
path breaking 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

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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'

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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.

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