The fuzzball

ABSTRACT

The Fuzzball is an operating system and applications library designed for the PDP11 family of computers. It was intended as a development platform and research pipewrench for the DARPA/NSF Internet, but has occasionally escaped to earn revenue in commercial service. It was designed, implemented and evolved over a seventeen-year era spanning the development of the ARPANET and TCP/IP protocol suites and can today be found at Internet outposts from Hawaii to Italy standing watch for adventurous applications and enduring experiments. This paper describes the Fuzzball and its applications, including a description of its novel congestion avoidance/control and timekeeping mechanisms.

REFERENCES

• BRA87: Braden, R. Requirements for internet gateways. DARPA Network Working Group Report RFC-1009, USC Information Sciences Institute, June 1987.
• BER87: Dimitri Bertsekas , Robert Gallager, Data networks, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1987
• CHU79: Chu, W.W., D.L. Mills, et al. Experimental results on the packet satellite network. Proc. National Telecommunications Conference, November 1979, pp. 45.4.1-45,4,12.
• DCA85: Defense Communications Agency. DDN Protocol Handbook. NIC-50004, NIC-50005, NIC-50006, (three volumes), SRI International, December 1985.
• GUS85: Riccardo Gusella , Stefano Zatti, The Berkeley UNIX 4.3BSD Time Synchronization Protocol, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 1985
• JAC78: Jacobs, i.M., R. Binder, and E.V. Hoversten. General purpose packet satellite networks. Proc. IEEE 66, (Nov 1978), I448- 1467.
• JEN86: Jennings, D.M., L.H. Landweber, I.H. Fuchs, D.J. Farber and W.R. Adrion. Computer networks for scientists. Science 231 (28 February 1986), 943-950.
• LEI85: Leiner, B., J. Postel, R. Cole and D. Mills. The DARPA Internet protocol suite. Proc. INFOCOM 85, Washington DC, March 1985. Also in: IEEE Communications Magazine, March 1985.
• MAR85: Keith Marzullo , Susan Owicki, Maintaining the time in a distributed system, ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, v.19 n.3, p.44-54, July 1985 [doi>10.1145/850776.850780]
• MIL76: Mills, D.L. An overview of the Distributed Computer Network. Proc. AFIPS 1976 National Computer Conference, New York, N.Y., June 1976.
• MIL81: Mills, D.L. Internetworking and the Atlantic SATNET. Proc. National Electronics Conference, October 1981, pp. 378-383.
• MIL83: Mills, D.L. DCN local-network protocols. DARPA Network Working Group Report RFC-891, M/A-COM Linkabit, December 1983.
• MIL84: Mills, D.L. Exterior Gateway Protocol formal specification. DARPA Network Working Group Report RFC-904, M/A-COM Linkabit, April 1984.
• MIL85: Mills, D.L. Internet Delay Experiments. DARPA Network Working Group Report RFC-889, M/A-COM Linkabit, December 1983.
• MIL87: D. L. Mills , H. Braun, The NSFNET backbone network, Proceedings of the ACM workshop on Frontiers in computer communications technology, p.191-196, August 11-13, 1987, Stowe, Vermont, United States
• MIL88: Mills, D.L. Network Time Protocol (Version 1) Specification and Implementation. Electrical Engineering Department Report 88- 04-01, University of Delaware, April 1988.
• MOC87: Mocapetris, P. Domain Names - Implementations and Specifications. DARPA Network Working Group Report RFC-1035, USC Information Sciences Institute, November 1987.
• NAG85: Nagle, J. On packet switches with infinite storage. DARPA Network Working Group Report RFC-970, Ford Aerospace, December 1985.
• PRU87: Prue, W., and J. Postel. Something a Host Could Do with Source Quench: The Source Quench Introduced Delay (SQUID), DARPA Network Working Group Report RFC-1016, USC Information Sciences Institute, July 1987.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.2 Network Protocols
          Subjects: Protocol verification

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.1 PROCESSOR ARCHITECTURES
      C.1.1 Single Data Stream Architectures

          Nouns: PDP-11
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.1 Network Architecture and Design

          Nouns: ARPANET
      C.2.2 Network Protocols

          Nouns: TCP/IP
  C.4 PERFORMANCE OF SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Performance attributes

  D. Software
  D.4 OPERATING SYSTEMS
      D.4.8 Performance
          Subjects: Queueing theory

General Terms:
Design, Performance, Verification