RFC-22

by Darius Kazemi, Jan 22 2019

In 2019 I'm reading one RFC a day in chronological order starting from the very first one. More on this project here. There is a table of contents for all my RFC posts.

Revisions

RFC-22 is an update to RFC-11. It is authored by Vint Cerf and dated October 17, 1969. Twelve days before the first message will be sent over the ARPANET!

Technical content

There is a new control message format that's been defined by UCLA. It does not conform to ASCII, as it's a control message and not plain text. Hooray.

There are now 9 control messages that can be sent over a control link (link 0 or 1, depending on the nature of the message, I think):

Then the specific packing of bits (the header format) is laid out.

Analysis

In RFC-11, text commands (presumably in ASCII) like “OPENAUX” were supposed to be sent to say things like “open an auxiliary connection”. Now we just send some packed data with a special numerical code. This means we send far less data over the network in order to do basic things like establish connections. This new encoding is like an order of magnitude more efficient in terms of the number of bytes being sent around.

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About me

I'm Darius Kazemi. I'm a Mozilla Fellow and I do a lot of work on the decentralized web with both ActivityPub and the Dat Project.