Routing, Flow, and Capacity Design in Communication and Computer Networks

CHAPTER 1

Overview

Communication networks¹ were born more than 100 years ago the moment Alexander Graham Bell made his now famous call to Thomas A. Watson and said “Watson come here, I want you!” on March 10, 1876. Almost a century later, another form of communication emerged when ARPAnet’s first two nodes were connected between the SDS Sigma 7 host computer at the University of California-Los Angeles and the SDS 940 host computer at the Stanford Research Institute, and the first message sent “Lo!” on October 29, 1969, crashed [Kle]! As we know, the famous phone call essentially gave birth to the development of the global switched telephone network, and the initial data message was the starting point of the eventually explosive growth of the ...