Network Design Principles to Differentiate the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

 

NANOG 33

Network Design Principles to Differentiate the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Barry Greene and Dave Meyer, Cisco Systems
January 30, 2005

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.