Introduction to the Internet How did the Internet start? Why was the Internet developed? How does Internet handle the traffic? Why WWW changed the Internet forever?

The Evolution of Internet §DARPA (Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency) started the ARPAnet in 1969 between four nodes §The Internet was primarily used for connecting academic campuses together until the mid 80’s §Academicians used the Internet for sharing ideas and research results via and ftp

The Evolution of Internet §Internet was primarily used for , usenet, file transfer and remote usage of machines §With , users were able to keep in touch §With usenet, users were able to discuss topics of interest in focussed newsgroups §With file transfer, users could download and upload articles, programs and images  With telnet, a user could login to his or her UNIX account from anywhere

Types of Traffic on the Internet § , usenet, ftp and telnet were applications that generated almost similar type of traffic stream on the Internet §This traffic required “reliability”. §The protocols were expected to deliver all the data no matter how long it took §With high error rate, the elapsed time simply increased but the transmissions were completed

How does the Internet Handle Traffic? §For transmission on the Internet, the TCP/IP suite of protocols breaks the data into datagrams or packets and routes each packet through an independently selected path §Packets may arrive at the destination out of sequence but due to buffering and re- ordering, the actual data can be recovered easily

Routing (Cereal Box Maze Solving??) §Selecting a path is called routing §The intermediate nodes from source to destination are called routers §Each router builds up a routing table to keep track of reachable destinations §If more than one path is open to destination, the router may select the “best” path

Independent Routing Decisions §Path selection criterion is usually shortest path first §If the shortest path is congested or unreliable, the router can choose another path §All routers decide independently and it is a distributed environment §Traditional TCP/IP based traffic is bursty and it can increase or decrease abruptly

Best Effort Network §If there is more traffic than the capacity, the newly arrived packets must be dropped (or discarded) §Thus increase in traffic may increase time- outs, retransmissions and decrease in efficiency §To sum it up, the traditional TCP/IP network based on packet switching is a “best effort” network

The World Wide Web §Up around 1990, Internet had expanded a lot and it contained a lot of information on hosts spread around the globe §Users had to use command-line tools to search and get the information §Usenet, public ftp sites and some search tools were used to extract the information from the Internet

The World Wide Web §Users had to work really hard in order to find the information they were looking for §With the introduction of GUI desktop, the users were introduced to the convenience of click and launch for applications §In a similar way, users were able to browse the help files and informative CD ROMS (such as encyclopaedias) easily with GUI

The World Wide Web §The introduction of hypertext marking language (HTML) in early 1990 has revolutionized the Internet §HTML and its associated protocol HTTP to publish HTML documents on the web have transformed the Internet into a user-oriented information repository §HTML has made it very easy to “publish” information online even for users with very little computer expertise

The World Wide Web §The open ended HTTP supports the linking of various types of data into the web published documents §HTTP makes it possible for web sites to offer binary files, images, and multimedia documents to the users with the click of a button §HTTP has also resulted in making the Internet very popular. Internet continues to expand in number of websites and the number of users

The World Wide Web §Web deployment is flexible and easy §Due to the web technologies, the Internet has been put to use in almost all areas of human knowledge §For example, water distribution monitoring, real-time traffic maps of big cities, free long distance calling, distance learning with lecture videos, buying and selling shares, online shopping etc., the list appears endless