Re: radical solutions

[Thomas Narten <narten@raleigh.ibm.com>]

> I don't see GSE as being particularly different from Guruprasad's
> architecture, although the details of MO's proposal may be fine-tuned
> (e.g., there's clever things we can do in the lower 8 bytes to make
> any mapping between them and the top 8 bytes easier, and which may
> eliminate use of the few bits robbed for local-to-the-site routing),

There are some interesting details buried in here. If you want to map
from the lower 8 bytes into something that can be used in the upper 8
bytes for routing, one likely needs a heirarchy in the lower bytes
(e.g., ala DNS delegations) so you can do the mapping in a scalable
way. Once you impose heirarchy, you lose the ability to just use MAC
addresses (aka EUI-64s) -- they only have two levels of heirarchy and
the heirarchy doesn't match what the delegation structure probably
needs to be (i.e., they reflect the manufacturer not the device
owner). As a consequence, one loses stateless addrconf and one still
needs a way of assigning the lower bytes (i.e., identifier) to
devices.

Thomas