A critical review of "End-to-end arguments in system design"

The end-to-end arguments raised by J. Saltzer, D. Reed and D. Clark (see ACM Trans. Comp. Sys., vol.2, no.4, p.277-88, 1984) are amongst the most influential of all communication protocol design guides. However, they have recently been challenged by the advent of firewalls, caches, active networks, NAT (network address translators), multicasting and network QoS. This paper reviews the end-to-end arguments, highlighting their subtleties, and provides additional arguments for and against end-to-end implementations. It shows the importance of trust as a criterion for deciding whether to implement a function locally or end-to-end, and how end-to-end implementations can help robustness, scalability, ease of deployment, and the provision of appropriate services. It focuses on the performance implications of end-to-end or localized functionality and argues against end-to-end congestion control of the form used by TCP.