First-generation commercial Internet network engineers used key principles in the way they built, deployed, and operated their networks. The principles were derived and deployed from core theorems that proved to scale during times of exponential growth. Until the publication of RFC 3439, "Some Internet Architectural Guidelines and Philosophy," these principles were undocumented and rarely passed to the next generation of network engineers.

This primer discusses in detail the core principles highlighted in RFC 3439 and reviews some of the assumed fundamentals of functional, hierarchical, and modular design that are core tools for today's network designs.

About the Presenters
Barry Raveendran Greene is a Senior Consultant in the Office of the CTO at Cisco. Barry's current topics of interest are ISP operations and security. He has been with Cisco since 1996, and is the co-coordinator for the Cisco ISP Workshop Program, designed to empower engineering talent in ISPs worldwide. Barry has more than 22 years experience in systems integration, security, operations, maintenance, management, and training on a variety of computer, internetworking, and telecommunications technologies.

David Meyer is currently Director of Internet Architecture and Engineering at Cisco Systems. Prior to that he served as Senior Scientist and Director of IP Technology Development at Sprint. He is also Director of the Advanced Network Technology Center at the University of Oregon. Prior to working at Sprint, he worked at Cisco, where he was involved in software development, working both on multicast and BGP. He is active in the IETF, where he chairs the MBONED, GROW, and DNSOP working groups, as well as being a member of several IETF directorates and Internet Research Task Force research groups. He is also active in the operator community and in other standards organizations as the ITU-T, where he co-chairs FGNGN WG 7.