> Discovery is a special case, that is not quite multicast. [...] So you > don't need any facility to "reach all" in one message.
Are we speaking of the IP Internet, or of some other network? A number of fundamental Internet protocols, such as ARP and ND, use multicast for discovery (I see broadcast as a special case of multicast). So if you want to implement the TCP/IP suite, your link layer needs to support multicast. Some people have tried to work around that (see RFC 2022, for example), with IMHO little success. What you seem to be arguing is that it would be possible to design a protocol suite that uses anycast for discovery. While an interesting research project, your suite would no longer be TCP/IP, good luck getting it deployed. (So what's the solution? As Toke suggested, push the multicast implementation to the link layer -- have the link layer convert multicast to multiple unicasts in a way that's invisible to the network layer. After all, that's what the link layer is for -- hiding the idiosyncrasies of a given physical layer from the network layer.) -- Juliusz _______________________________________________ Cerowrt-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/cerowrt-devel
