Essential Reading for Network Professionals

A long time ago in an inter-network far, far away, some fundamental discoveries about packet switched networks were made. Too much of this is widely forgotten nowadays. This page is an attempt to collect links to documents every network professional should know by heart.

RFC 896: Congestion Control in IP/TCP Internetworks
RFC 970: On Packet Switches With Infinite Storage
(Note: in the meantime time to live has been replaced by hop count, invalidating the fundamental assumption of RFC 970, that a finite time to live of any packet would both save the network and would create an upper limit for used packet storage.)
End-to-End Arguments in System Design (plain text version)
RFC 1958: Architectural Principles of the Internet
It's the Latency, Stupid (alternative link saved in wayback machine)
When The CRC and TCP Checksum Disagree (alternative link)


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