2.1 Elements of the Internetwork System

The internetwork environment consists of hosts connected to networks which are in turn interconnected via gateways. It is assumed here that the networks may be either local networks (e.g., the ETHERNET) or large networks (e.g., the ARPANET), but in any case are based on packet switching technology. The active agents that produce and consume messages are processes. Various levels of protocols in the networks, the gateways, and the hosts support an interprocess communication system that provides two-way data flow on logical connections between process ports.

The term packet is used generically here to mean the data of one transaction between a host and its network. The format of data blocks exchanged within the a network will generally not be of concern to us.

Hosts are computers attached to a network, and from the communication network's point of view, are the sources and destinations of packets. Processes are viewed as the active elements in host computers (in accordance with the fairly common definition of a process as a program in execution). Even terminals and files or other I/O devices are viewed as communicating with each other through the use of processes. Thus, all communication is viewed as inter-process communication.

Since a process may need to distinguish among several communication streams between itself and another process (or processes), we imagine that each process may have a number of ports through which it communicates with the ports of other processes.