Special Edition Using TCP/IP, Second Edition

Autonomous System Routing Architecture

A well-defined structure is one of the most important assets of any organization from a large company to a system of government. Empires such as the Roman Empire or the Mughal Empire had well-defined and efficient administrative structures in the peak of their existence. On the other hand, students of history would consider an unwieldy or grotesque administrative structure as an indication of the decline of an empire. The structure of the early Internet did exhibit such an unwieldy formation because of the routing architecture of the time. Fortunately, the architecture was changed and a new system of networks called autonomous systems was implemented to reorganize the rapidly growing Internet into well-defined ...