The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols
Understanding the underlying principles behind something can turn what might on the surface seem to be simply a collection of facts into a chain of causes and consequences that makes it much easier to see how those parts fit together. Clark provides us with some of those insights for the design of the Internet Protocols, working from the goals towards the implementation consequences.
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The only error the communicating parties should ever see is the case of total partition. If the application(s) on either end of the connection are not required to resolve any other failures, then the state necessary for recovery must be held in the lower layers – but where? One option is to put it in the intermediate nodes in the network, and of course to protect it from loss it must be replicated. I think the knee-jerk reaction of many system designers today might be to distribute the state in some such manner, maybe using a gossip-protocol. But the original designers of the internet had a insight which enabled a much simpler solution, and they called it ‘fate sharing.’
