Re: comments on draft-py-multi6-gapi-00.txt

[Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch@muada.com>]

On Thu, 6 Feb 2003, Brian E Carpenter wrote:

> You seem to imagine that geographical allocation will somehow
> match up with topology and therefore cause aggregation. All
> historical evidence suggests otherwise.

Historical evidence shows a trend of interconnection getting denser (but
slowly). I don't see why we shouldn't take advantage of that where
possible. If we use geographic addressing for multihomers there is the
potential that we can later aggregate on geography if there is some
level (not necessarily a very high level) of interconnection within
regions. If we use another mechanism to allocate address space for
multihomers we don't have this option. As there doesn't seem to be any
other way to allocate address space for multihomers that has other
benefits (other than being slightly simpler) I can't see any
justification to NOT allocate them geographically.

> If we could pass a law that every local government in the world
> had to set up a monopoly IXP for its area, we might be able to
> obtain enough congruence between geography and topology. But I
> don't expect that any time soon.

100% interconnection within regions is not required: if there is
interconnection, fine, we can aggregate. If there isn't, also fine, but
no aggregation for multihomers in that region. This is a numbers game:
most of the large networks interconnect in enough locations to be able
to aggregate to a usable degree. And presumably, this will get better
rather than worse over time. At some point it may even make business
sense to interconnect more rather than buy bigger hardware.

> Can't we just accept that only a two-layer solution that separates
> identfier-addresses from locator-addresses can solve this puzzle,
> and move on to figure out the two-layer solution?

I'm all for that but I think we need something short-term as well.