Richard,

On 9 Jul 2013, at 19:52, "Y. Richard Yang" <[email protected]> wrote:

> 
> 
> 
> On Sun, Jul 7, 2013 at 6:39 AM, Ben Niven-Jenkins <[email protected]> 
> wrote:
>> Rich & Richard,
>> 
>> On 6 Jul 2013, at 18:19, Richard Alimi wrote:
>> > On Fri, Jul 5, 2013 at 9:27 PM, Y. Richard Yang <[email protected]> wrote:
>> > RY:The exact requirement will be:
>> > If a Server s provides a cost map c, then its IRD must provide the network 
>> > map used by c, to avoid the case that s provides a network map n, but c 
>> > uses network map n'.
>> >
>> > RA: I tend to think its okay if the a particular IRD provides only the 
>> > cost map but not link back to the network map.  I see the tradeoffs as the 
>> > following:
>> >
>> > Advantages of having a link to the network map (in addition to its ID):
>> > - easier for a client to "correct" itself if it somehow discovered an IRD 
>> > with the cost map
>> >
>> > Disadvantages of having a link to the network map (in addition to its ID):
>> > - server is responsible for keeping track of back-references and redundant 
>> > information (as you point out)
>> >
>> > In general, I'm in favor of reducing the coupling as much as possible, 
>> > though admittedly a cost map and network map are coupled already by a 
>> > Version Tag.
>> 
>> [BN] The difference is that both the networkmap-generator and the 
>> costmap-generator have to deterministically produce the same Version Tag for 
>> the same map input/generation, they don't need to know anything about each 
>> other, so version tag generation can be loosely coupled. Backlinks require 
>> the generator to know which (of possibly many) URIs it was called from and 
>> therefore which backlink to use and are therefore more tightly coupled.
> 
> Interesting point that networkmap and costmap can be generated in different 
> servers, as long as they are consistent. In other words, the VTAG generation 
> must be deterministic from a given network.
> 
> The scenario that I have in mind, which I assumed to be more typical, is that 
> a control server computes a topology from the base network topology, extracts 
> the nodes as the network map, and computes the pairwise cost (attributes) as 
> the cost map. 

Even if a single server is calculating both the network & cost maps then you 
are likely to have multiple servers for resiliency or due to demand load and 
might put them behind a load balancer. Because the network map and cost map are 
retrieved via separate requests you cannot guarantee both requests hit the same 
backend server (e.g. Because a server may fail or be removed from the load 
balancer pool) so you need to be able to deterministically generate vtags 
across different servers even for your use case I think. 

Ben
> 
> I agree with the comment on backlinks at the cost map.
>  
> Richard
> 
> 
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