Vinton Cerf In 1975, the creation of two men began to link the world together.

The first tes t of the //http://www.internetsociety.org/articles/tcpip-25th-anniversary TCP (Later TCP/IP) Protocol between Stanford and University College London occur ed. This expanded to 3 networks in a later test (1977) and by 1983 it was a universal sta ndard. One of the men behind this was Vinton Cerf (the other being Bob Kahn), who is kn own by many as the "Father of the Internet". Cerf co-designed the TCP/IP protocol, whic h allowed //Forbes; 10/6/1997 ASAP, Vol. 160 Issue 7, p132-133, 2p, 1 Black and White Photograph computers speaking different languages to communicate over phone-lines(and later extended include other means) then continued working with the internet through the 70's a nd mid 80's first working with ARPA, then MCI. He rejoined Bob Kahn for research in 1986 at the Corporation for National Research Initiatives. Starting in 1992 Cerf involved hi mself in the administration of the internet, first by founding the Internet Society, then as Chairman http://www.nist.gov/director/vcat/cerf.cfm of ICANN from 2000-2007. Cerf is best known today as the "Chief Internet Evangel ist" of Google, a position he's held since 2005. He is a highly decorated individual, se veral of his more noteable awards being the National Medal of Technology in 1997, Living Lege nd Medal in 2000, the Turning Award in 2004 along with his longtime partner Robert Kahn, and the P residential medal of Freedom in 2005 also with Kahn. He's known for his startlingly accurate predicti ons for the future of technology, predicting the proliferation of eBooks and the switch to I Pv6. Currently he's working with NASA on developing protocols for the Interplanetary Internet. Some of his lesser known qualities are his style (only man at Google to wear a suit) and hum or. By humor I am of course referring to his wonderful contributions to literature such as RF Cs 968, 1121, 1217, and 1607; containing such wonders as specifications for ultra slow communi cation protocols by means of Abrams tanks, and A Night Before Christmas rewritten as the story of the first TCP/IP test. If Vinton Cerf is the most important man in the creation of the internet(or at l east one of the two most important) TCP/IP is the most important protocol, enclosing all the oth ers. TCP/IP could refer to one of two things, either the Internet Protocol Stack as a whole, or th e two backbone protocols of the internet, TCP and IP, both originally designed by Vinton Cerf. The Internet Protocol Stack consists of five layers, Application layer, Transport layer, Netw

ork Layer, Link Layer, and Physical Layer. The Application layer consists of protocols that directly interact with applicat ions, such as HTTP, SMTP, IMAP, FTP that interact with web browsers and mail programs. DNS als o resides on this layer. The Transport Layer consists of protocols that transmit application layer messages between application endpoints (sockets/ports). The two main protocols of this la yer are UDP and TCP. TCP is a reliable connection oriented protocol, and the primary Transport l ayer protocol of the internet(UDP being used for a substantially smaller number of applications). TCP was originally //http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc675 specified in 1974, updated to v4 in 1981, and adopted as the main transport prot ocol of the "internet"(if you could call it that at the time) in 1983, when there was a flag day by which all networked computers needed to be compatible with the protocol. TCP begins by establishing a connection between two processes with a "three way handshake", ho st A sends a special segment to host B, which replies with a special segment, then host a sen ds another special segment to host B finalizing the connection. TCP then starts recieving d ata to transfer, putting in a send buffer, from which every so often it will take out data equal( or less than) to the maximum segment size agreed on in the three way handshake and send it as a segment(apply ing the TCP header to the data). The recieving process sticks the segments in a recieve buffer from which it reads the data. The core of TCP has changed very little since its adoption as a networ king standard in 1983, congestion control being the most frequently modified, and even then more variants(Tahoe, Reno Vegas) than widely adopted updates. One modern problem is since the congestion c ontrol mechanism always assumes dropped packets are due to network congestion TCP can interact pr oblematically with wireless networks, where packets can be dropped for many reasons unrelated to co ngestion. This is one of the reasons that congestion control is one of the most modified of the aspect of TCP. While the Transport Layer delivers messages from application to application the Network layer protocols deliver messages from host to host (computer to computer). The IP prot ocol is a Network layer protocol that defines the datagram (message) fields and how to act on the information in these fields. The most widely know aspect of the IP protocol is t he IP address the unique identfier that a network capable device has that enables the device t o be specified as the recipient of a message. IP, like TCP has undergone few changes since 1981(when the RFC on v4 was publish ed), IPv4 still the dominant protocol. However this will change in the near future since the nee d for more

addresses necesitates the switch to IPv6. One of the main differences between ve rsion 4 and 6 of the IP protocol is the number of addresses supported, v4 uses a 32 bit addr ess(~4 billion possible) and v6 uses a 128 bit address (~3.4*10^38 possible addresses), a numbe r Cerf is satisfied by, since by the time they run out it will no longer be his problem. R ealistically having several orders of magnitude more addresses than people living on this pla nent means one does not need to worry about running out of them (ever, or at the very least not in the forseeable future). Other than IP the Network layer includes various routing protocols to g et the information from one location to another most efficiently. While the Network layer gets the message from host to host, the Link layer gets it from Node to Node, the internet being made up of millions of interconnected (networke d) nodes (computers, routers, and switches). Two common examples of this type of protocol are Ethernet and Wifi. Finally we have the Physical Layer, which is responsible for making sure individual bits of the message make it from node to node. The protocols are link and transmission medium dependent, an example being Ethernet(Link layer) having diff erent physical protocols for UTP copper wire, Coaxial (copper), and Fiber optic cables . Think of it this way, starting at the last node before the destination, the Phys ical Layer transmits the individual bits of the message to the next node (in this case the destination node), the Link Layer deals with the entire message at once rather than individu al bits ensuring it gets from this node to the next, the Network Layer delivers a messag e to the destination host working on host to host(encompassing all nodes in the path betw een the two hosts) delivery leaving the two lower level layers to deal with node to node, then the Transport layer takes over and delivers it to the correct application, where the application level takes over and decides what to do with the information from there(since Ap plication Layer protocols define the format and sequence of messages and hence how to read them) . Looking ahead, Cerf and Kahn's creation TCP/IP is a robust platform that will ke ep the net running for the rest of the forseeable future.

//Kurose and Ross, Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach, 6th edition, Inter national Edition