Re: [RRG] Long term clean-slate only for the RRG?

["William Herrin" <bill@herrin.us>]

On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 9:17 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
>    > routing and addressing are fundamentally inseparable
>
> True, but addressing is just one aspect of a routing architecture - O() 20%
> of the whole, I'd say.

Noel,

That rather depends on the architecture. If you take the tack I posted
about recently (ephemeral locater-only addresses at layer 3), address
assignment, deprecation, revocation and reassignment becomes more like
80% of the routing protocol's job. The rest looks a lot like other
routing protocols now but with a fraction of the routes due to very
effective address aggregation.


On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 11:59 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
> Addresses (routing-names) are the data that path-selection (routing) works
> on. As such, they are inherently inseparable.

Layer-3 addresses presently describe two characteristics of the
endpoint: its network location and its identity. In a clean slate
environment, it is not obvious to me that path-selection need know
anything about the identity part; it need only know about one of the
network locations.

If you take identity out of layer 3 entirely and insist that layer 4
use the layer-3 IP address no more than layer 3 uses the layer-2 MAC
address, a lot of really interesting things become possible in the
routing/addressing space.


It occurs to me as we talk about splitting locaters from identity, we
may be saying that OSI layer 3 is conceptually wrong. We need to
establish a node identity somewhere beneath the transport layer but
above the routing at the network layer. Is there a layer missing
between 3 and 4?

Regards,
Bill Herrin


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William D. Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us
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