ABSTRACT
The bedrock of the current cyber infrastructure is the Internet. In the following sections we present a brief overview of the Internet’s architecture and history, focusing in particular on those aspects that are relevant to the later discussion of the I-2 infrastructure. A reader seeking a more complete discussion of the Internet is referred to [Comer 2006, Gralla 2006, Leiner et al. 1997]. Both the architecture of the Internet as well as the strategic decisions that its architects made to facilitate its growth embody important lessons about building successful distributed global infrastructures. The discussion in this chapter is a preamble to the discussion in Chapters 7 and 8 in which we discuss the guidelines for architecting the emerging distributed global infrastructure-the I-2.
