advanced research projects agency (ARPA)

The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) is a research institution of the US Department of Defense. ARPA was founded by the US government at the end of the 1950s with the aim of developing innovative technologies. One of ARPA's tasks was to investigate methods for reliable data transmission that also met military requirements. For this purpose, ARPA developed a packet-oriented data transmission with decentralized connection setup instead of the circuit-switched transmission used until then.