mnot’s Web log

“Design depends largely on constraints.” — Charles Eames

Thursday, 15 April 2004

Five Favourite Protocol Design Papers

Lots of papers come and go over the years; take a look at any tech conference, online bibliographies (even subject-specific ones; Webbib is a favourite), and you’ll be inundated.

However, a few rise above the rest (no pun intended) and have real staying power; invariably, they’re about good, principled design, usually with the benefit of hard experience.

I admit a bias towards those about the Web and HTTP, but considering its success, I think it’s something other protocols could emulate. Without any more elaboration, my favourites;

A Note on Distributed Computing [pdf] — A classic that many still haven’t fully taken in

On the Design of Application Protocols — Marshall Rose’s tour de force explanation of good protocol design, with a heavy IETF bent (they tend to get things right)

Principled Design of the Modern Web Architecture [pdf] — Roy Fielding on REST (a.k.a, what HTTP got right)

Clarifying the Fundamentals of HTTP [pdf] — This oft-overlooked paper by Jeff Mogul (another HTTP author) on what HTTP got wrong

The WebDAV Property Design [pdf] — A detailed explanation of the decisions you’ll face when dealing with protocol metadata.

Any others out there?


Protocol Design

discussion of this entry

Itamar said…

I've been keeping all the links on protocols and protocol design I've seen on delicious: http://del.icio.us/itamarst/protocols (Note that page doesn't show all of them, you'll need to click on older dates to see them).

Sunday, April 25 2004 at 9:59 AM +10:00

mel pullen said…

One paper that I keep coming back to is - "end-to-end arguments in system design": http://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/endtoend/endtoend.pdf

Some interesting student comments on this paper are at: http://cgi.cs.duke.edu/~priya/HyperNews/get.cgi/eval2.html

My view, FWIW, is that a protocol is a serial API. It includes the sequence as well as the functions.

Wednesday, July 28 2004 at 1:24 AM +10:00

Arun said…

I want the solution mannual for the Book "Principles of Network Protocol Design" authored by "Mohammad G.Gouda". Can anyone help me in this regard.

Thursday, May 4 2006 at 2:35 AM +10:00

Ramzi El-khater said…

I'm looking for the same thing. You can find a few solutions to problems in the book on Goudas webpage

http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~gouda/

Go to Classes and then go through the homework solutions

Sunday, May 21 2006 at 10:56 PM +10:00

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