Voice Over IP

ATTRIBUTES OF THE INTERNET

Before we begin analyzing the Internet operations, it will prove helpful to examine in more detail the major attributes of the Internet, introduced in Chapter 1.

As we learned, the Internet was developed to transfer data traffic by using adaptive routing features. By adaptive routing, we mean that the traffic may take different routes through the Internet depending on the conditions at a specific time. In addition, the Internet is designed as a connectionless system which means that there are no "affiliations" established between the machines in the Internet. As a result, the Internet does not maintain an ongoing knowledge of the user's traffic. In effect, the Internet Protocol (IP) is stateless; that is to say, it ...