RE: Distribution CPG Protocol - Some Thoughts

[Stephen Thomas <stephen.thomas@transnexus.com>]

At 08:49 AM 2001-01-05 -0500, Oliver Spatscheck wrote:


>Since I introduced the word region I would like to clarify that
>I never intended to imply geographic region. Internally we use
>the term region as a collection of prefixes.... . I think AS
>is to coarse grain. If I tell you it is in 701 what do you
>really know. So I guess neither term is intuitive and clear.


I'm not real happy with AS either, mainly because there's not algorithmic 
relationship between different values. (ASN 701 and 702 may be no "closer," 
in a network sense, than ASN 701 and 3383811.)

By prefixes do you mean IP address prefixes? If so, is that any better than 
AS numbers? Maybe within a subnet. (There's a pretty good chance that 
172.16.1.1 is real close to 172.16.1.2.) But would you say the same thing 
outside of a subnet? (Which is closer to 172.16.1.1 network-wise, 
172.17.1.1 or 10.1.2.1?) In fact, I'd think that ASNs might actually be a 
little better since they don't have the ambiguity of variable netmasks. 
172.16.1.1 and 172.16.2.1 might be on the same subnet (if the netmask is 16 
bits), but they might also be 50 hops away on the other side of the world 
(if the netmask is 24 bits).