Re: Transport level multihoming

[Greg Maxwell <gmaxwell@martin.fl.us>]

On Wed, 8 Aug 2001, Daniel Senie wrote:

> As I said, I remain open to transport level involvement if there's no other
> way. The arguments REALLY do remind me of the 802.5 ones. While I agree we
> are orders of magnitude larger in scope here, we also have significantly
> improved technology to work with. The reliance on "sky is falling"
> arguments to justify standards development which at best will take years is
> what I'm questioning. MPLS was started because of a belief we could never
> build routers that could handle the massive loads, yet routers CAN handle
> the loads. Yes, MPLS has other uses now.

What would be useful is a metric for defining the global computational and
storage complexity for transport-level and network-level multihoming.

Then we can make a comparison: Only if the global complexity of
network-level solution is much less then the transport-level solution
could it be an acceptable solution.

For example, if we accepted that people could only be multihomed to a
single multi-provider (i.e. a provider maintains multiple separate but
interconnected networks) so that we could maintain aggregation, this
solution would be preferable on a global routing complexity basis to
transport-level multihoming.