Hello all, Related to the debate on the mobile-ip list on whether MIPv6 should use Routing Header or some other mechanism to carry the home address to a mobile node that is away from home, I'd like to solicit for well grounded opinions on the intended semantics of the Routing Header.
To properly understand what I am really asking about we must first make a distinction between two logical entities, endpoints and locations. In the current Internet architecture, both endpoints and locations are identified with a single mechanism, i.e. with IP addresses. However, they are conceptually different, as very well pointed out by Noel Chiappa in http://users.exis.net/~jnc/tech/endpoints.txt In essense, a communication endpoint is an active entity engadged in the communications, i.e. a party who consumes messages and generates new ones. A location, on the other hand, is a topological "place" within the routing fabric. Now, my question is fairly simple: Is the meaning of the routing header to allow a packet to be sent through a number of communicating hosts (end-points) or via a specific path, identified by a set of locations? Or is it both? One way of pondering the question is to imagine that the endpoints and locations had different name spaces. For example, you could imagine that each host has a flat name tag (HIT in HIP terminology), and the locations are named according to the routing hierarchy as today. Under such an architecture, would the routing header contain addresses or these new name tags, or could it contain a mixture of both? The reason why I am asking this is the scenario, which Charlie Perkins has offered, where a packet is source routed through a Mobile Node that is away from home. According to his argumentation, in such case the routing header should have a route looking like .... - Care-of-Address - Home Address - .... where the Care-of-Address is the current location of the mobile node, and the Home Address is more like the end-point identifier of the mobile node. I am having hard time in clearly crasping the intended semantic meaning of this construction. --Pekka Nikander -------------------------------------------------------------------- IETF IPng Working Group Mailing List IPng Home Page: http://playground.sun.com/ipng FTP archive: ftp://playground.sun.com/pub/ipng Direct all administrative requests to [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------
