Re: [RRG] Are we solving the wrong problem?

[Jari Arkko <jari.arkko@piuha.net>]

Mark,

These are interesting thoughts and worthwhile to be looked at in more
detail. Do you have a proposal?

You are basically going into the direction that is similar to Shim6 in
the sense that multihoming is exposed, not hidden. But also different
from Shim6 in the sense that it operated at layer 3, and from what I
understand your goal was to actually develop new transport layers that
would be capable of taking the advantage of such exposed multihoming.

I suspect that load balancing of a single connection over multiple paths
is a tough problem. How much research has there been on that, and do we
have results that would already be usable for something like that? I.e.,
is this solvable in the near future?

In any case, what I find interesting in this space is the different
design tradeoffs. A routing system that hides multihoming and provider
independence from the endpoints is easy for the endpoints and edge
networks. I.e., you do not have to change hosts in any way, every
network has a single prefix, renumbering is not necessary,
providers/network owners are in control of what kind of multihoming and
TE is going on, etc.

But it also makes the routing system more expensive, because it has to
maintain a lot of information. Many of the RRG people are searching for
a better organization of this information so that its maintenance would
be cheaper -- but you are actually looking at removing some of this
information. I guess the main question is, can we substantially reduce
the costs of the routing system while keeping the same amount of
information and functionality in it? I'm not sure I know the answer yet.
Another drawback of the hiding approach is that it might be ultimately
less capable, if you consider things like hosts being able to react on
transport layer timescales to congestion and their own communication
demands.

Jari


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