[RRG] names vs. addresses

["Dmitri Krioukov" <dima@caida.org>]

several people, including vint cerf at the last sigcomm,
talk about differentiating between node names (or IDs)
and node addresses having some topological sense. i'd
like to emphasize that, at least formally, this distinction
is very well understood, formalized, and researched. it
is directly related to what's called name-independent
routing (working with node "names") vs. name-dependent
routing (working with node "addresses").

indeed, by definition (http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.NI/0508021),
name-dependent routing embeds some topological information
in node labels which thus cannot be arbitrary, while routing
that can work on the graphs with arbitrary node labels is
called name-independent. thus, networking terms like "node
name" or "node ID" essentially refers to the name-independent
case, while the term "node address" usually implies a
topologically informative node label, i.e., the name-dependent
case.

even finer classification is considered in http://arxiv.org/abs/cs.DC/9903009
which differentiates the name-dependent case into the two
subcases: node label set is 1...n (case \beta) or completely
arbitrary (case \gamma).
--
dima.
http://www.caida.org/~dima/



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