At 11:43 PM -0400 8/10/00, Vijay Gill wrote:
>On Fri, 11 Aug 2000, Anthony Atkielski wrote:
>
> > > The problem is that we (as a profession) don't know
> > > how to do that. We have to make routing scale, and
> > > that demands aggregation, which in turn demands
> > > structured addresses.
> >
> > The telephone company figured out how to avoid problems decades ago. Why
> > the computer industry has to rediscover things the hard way mystifies me.
>
>Oh god, not this argument again.
>
>This is the circuit vs connectionless debate. I am sure if you do a
>search on Kleinrock and Mills in open literature, you will find all sorts
>of reasonings behind why this divide exists.
>
>To grossly oversimplify things, the phone systems do a relatively slow
>setup and once it is set up, let it stay till it is done and then tear it
>down. There isn't a phone company that does setups and teardowns (if I
>may stretch the term) at a rate that can match the connections initiated
>and torn down involving tcp/ip for http alone that pass through a core
>router in any promising local ISP.
Actually it has less to do with the connectionless/connection debate
and more to do with what they are naming. What the phone companies
did (and the Internet as yet to do), was precisely what John Shoch
outlined in his paper over 20 years ago and that Saltzer expanded on
not quite 10 years later. They made the location independent
"addresses" application names and kept the location dependent names,
i.e the addresses on which they do their routing. These network
addresses are the same as the ones they have always been using but
they are only internal. It is just that they used a similar syntax
for both to give people the impression they were actually doing
something else. But the syntax of the names has nothing to do with
their semantics.
Now, it is the case that most communication with applications both in
the phone system and on the Internet is connection based so this
mapping does not have to be done too often. So there is a connection
(no pun intended) but it is distinctly secondary. However, it
remains that it is applications that should have location independent
names and network addresses that should have location dependent names.
Take care,
John
