ABSTRACT
When the Internet was conceived-then as the ARPAnet-it was intentionally set up to support a mesh interconnect infrastructure with a very flat hierarchy. This was very advantageous for what it was intended to do: survive the outage of a significant number of nodes in case of a nuclear attack. As a result, everything was set up to be “self-routing,” and a centralized NMC was not only undesirable, it was unwanted. A centralized Network Management Center (NMC) for signaling and call and transmittal routing would have made ARPAnet vulnerable even if the router network were distributed. Therefore, even if the transport network had been able to transmit datagrams, an outage of the centralized NMC would have rendered useless the transport network’s distributed nature and its virtual invulnerability.
