The Art of Network Architecture: Business-Driven Design

Chapter 4. Models

Models have always served a place in conceptualizing and understanding ideas and spaces. In fact, for many years the U.S. Patent Office required that every patent filing required a physical model implementing the idea. This would not only allow the patent examiner to fully understand the idea in an intuitive way, it would also allow easy comparison of new ideas to old by comparing the models. In the world of networking, models serve much the same purpose—to illustrate an idea in a way that makes it intuitive, or easy to grasp.

If you’re thinking about the seven-layer International Standards Organization (ISO) model of computer networks, you’re on the right track. But unless you’ve explored other possible models of network architecture, ...