Re: GSE

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

> In any case, I'm not convinced that there's a LOT of need to
> have an identifier to locator mapping.  You need a hostname to 
> identifier and locator mapping, but when would you go from 
> identifier to locator without the hostname?

The standard argument has been that if you can't perform a mapping
from identifier to locator, it limits the ability to recover from
failures where the existing binding stops working. I.e., how do you
recover a TCP connection when this happens?

I.e, either recovery is not possible (in some scenarios), or it's
pushed back to higher layers (e.g., application and DNS lookup). But
if the application is responsible for recovery, its not clear how
attractive a solution this would be in practice (or how much more
benefit one gets compared to using full-blown addresses with no
separation of identifier and locator, as apps could do the same sort
of failure recovery today).

Of course, how often such failures will occur and thus how important
it is to deal with them depends on a lot of details/assumptions about
how frequently and underwhat conditions the bindings become invalid.

Thomas