So much traffic has flown by on this subject that my head is still spinning.
But, let me give one example in which the use of site-locals on globally
connected networks might be useful.

While at SRI International, I had the privilege of participating in a study of
autonomous teams of unmanned vehciles with the Office of Naval Research. Such
teams may consist of hundreds/thousands of mobile vehicles that travel together
in a more-or-less coordinated fashion. Communications are nicely modeled by
Mobile Ad-hoc Networking, as in the IETF MANET WG. Very large teams may be
organized into "clusters" based on geography, commonalities of interest,
etc. Finally, the team as a whole is only intermittently connected to the
global Internet - perhaps with long periods of disconnected operation.

When the team is out of contact with the global Internet, site-locals can provide
a nice means to facilitate intra-cluster and inter-cluster communcations. When the
team comes in contact with an access router(s) to the the global Internet, the global
prefixes can be disemminated to team members that need global access. But since the
team is mobile, global access may be intermittent, with new global prefixes learned
as different access routers are encountered.

So it seems tome that site-locals can provide a useful mechanism for large mobile
networks with intermittent global connectivity.

Fred Templin
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


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