I. Introduction

We have been engaged in two activities since the network meeting of March 17, 1970 and, as promised, are reporting our results.

First, we have considered the various modifications suggested from all quarters and have formed preferences about each of these. In Section II we give our preferences on each issue, together with our reasoning.

Second, we have tried to formalize the protocol and algorithms for the NCP, we attempted to do this with very little specification of a particular implementation. Our attempts to date have been seriously incomplete but have led to a better understanding. We include here, only a brief sketch of the structure of the NCP. Section III gives our assumptions about the environment of the NCP and in Section IV the components of the NCP are described.