Functional Structures in Networks

The architecture of &quote;The Worlds Biggest Machine^&quote; is of course expressed in the many underlying communications standards; however it is far from explicit nor readily accessible. While on one hand, marketing people are busy looking for their so called &quote;Killer Applications&quote; that will maintain the economic growth of this machine, the engineers are struggling to keep up with the myriad of networks, pro- tocols and standards that interconnect an ever growing number of network services across a rapidly increasing variety of platforms and protocols. Within the industry, it is commonly accepted that fewer than 10% of engineers working in the field have sufficient knowledge and experience to tackle the p- study and feasibility phases; that is to say, only this group can process the knowl- edge and overview of the elusive architecture that allow them to identify the net- work nodes, network services, protocols and messages that will be affected by adding new network functionalities. It follows that 90% of engineers are capable of performing the execution phase.