Browse Books

Reviewer: William Stallings

Metcalfe is the prime inventor of Ethernet, which has dominated the local area network (LAN) market since shortly after its arrival. Metcalfe was also involved in the design of the protocols and switches that led to the Internet. The heart of the book is Metcalfe's 1973 doctoral thesis. This thesis deals not with LANs but with packet communication. It is of historical interest because it expresses the ideas that were then beginning to drive the design of TCP/IP and the Internet, but it is worth more than that. Metcalfe's writing is exceptionally clear, and his thesis covers a broad range of topics. While there is nothing here that is not to be found in more recent works, the book offers important lessons to today's network or protocol designer. Reading through this thesis, one sees that many of today's design issues, in terms of flow and congestion control, buffer design, and routing, are similar to those faced by earlier workers in the field. Metcalfe's characterization of these issues provides insights that are valuable today. The most significant topics covered in the thesis are performance issues related to store-and-forward packet switching networks, packet radio networks, and end-to-end protocol design. The book includes a 14-page “Retrospective,” in which Metcalfe looks back at his thesis and the birth of the Internet and draws some interesting conclusions. It also includes two early RFCs not available online. RFC 62, “A System for Interprocess Communication” (August 1970), by Dave Walden, proposes a connectionless message-oriented protocol for ARPANET. This proposal was not adopted, but it contains some interesting ideas that are reflected in contemporary protocols such as remote procedure calls. RFC 89, hyperbolically titled “Some Historic Moments in Networking” (June 1971), gives the reader some idea of what problems were being addressed when ARPANET had less than 20 hosts. All in all, this book is enjoyable. I would not put it on any network engineer's must-read list, but I recommend it highly.