RE: tunneling [Was: Agenda for Vienna]

[Pekka Savola <pekkas@netcore.fi>]

On Tue, 20 May 2003, Tony Li wrote:
> Meta note: if we're trying to talk architecture, I'd say that
> dealing with the identifier/locator relationship is secondary.
> 
> Our primary discussion should be about alternatives to
> "identifier/locator split" solutions.  That's clearly one
> architecture, what are others that folks find credible?
> 
> Tunneling has certainly been mentioned.  I've always considered
> this simply a mechanism for virtualizing the topology.  There's
> effectively still a single address per host, so there's nothing
> new in addressing.

"Tunneling" is too generic a term here, and I don't know how you mean it.  
I think you refer to some host-to-host end2end automatic tunneling 
mechanisms..

> Other directions?

(I'm wondering how to say this without going too far into solutions, 
perhaps trying to abstract Iljitsch' list might be useful.)

1) caring for the small organizations
- use of multiple addresses, connection survivability optional
- multi-connecting

2) caring for the very large/international organizations
- having very large end-sites have their own address blocks
- requiring international endsites to get addresses for each region from a 
regional ISP (satisfies the traffic engineering requirements)

IMO, the biggest question seems to be whether we want to find a "magic" 
solution for large/larger end-sites.  Smaller ones are probably easier to 
cure rather easily.

It may also be prudent to consider which properties of multihoming are 
required for each scenario:

 - being able to switch ISP's without renumbering
 - redundancy due to link failures etc.
 - connection survivability (internal connections, external connections)
 - more fine-grained (ie. not 50/50) inbound traffic engineering
 - the maximum frequency of ISP (=prefix) changes
 - ...

but perhaps this is a bit too detailed yet.

-- 
Pekka Savola                 "You each name yourselves king, yet the
Netcore Oy                    kingdom bleeds."
Systems. Networks. Security. -- George R.R. Martin: A Clash of Kings