$Id: draft-vidya-p2psip-eclients-00-rev.txt,v 1.1 2009/07/27 14:42:14 ekr Exp $
After reading this draft, I don't see what it brings to the party. RELOAD currently supports clients in two ways: 1. Clients can attach to the peer responsible for their node ID (I'll call this RP). At this point they're universally reachable, but through the RP. 2. Clients can attach to arbitrary other peers in the overlay. They can immediately send request through those peers, and responses will pass back through those peers via symmetric routing. If you advertise a route stack, you can arrange that requests go to you directly. Otherwise, requests have to go through the RP. Note that these approaches can be used in tandem. I.e., you connect to the RP for requests *to* you and to other (topologically closer on the real network) closer to you for requests from you. As I understand the value proposition of this draft, it is intended to serve in cases where either the RP is unreachable from the client or merely unattractive. The way it does this is by having the client connect to a Direct Attachment Point (DP) which then connects to the RP (called OAP here). As before, requests to the client go through the OAP and then the DAP, but the client can originate requests through the DAP. This is presented as an optimization, and it is over method (1), but it's not really an optimization over methods (1) and (2) used together. The one respect in which it is an improvement, that I can see, is that it covers cases in which the client cannot connect directly to the RP or in which the client is mobile and would have to repeatedly reconnect to the RP, whereas the DAP can be used as a stable point. However, it seems to me that this same effect could be achieved simply by having the DAP actually be a TURN server. The client could then connect to the TURN server and through it to the RP. You get the same message paths, but there's no additional protocol mechanisms required to tell anyone that this is a client--everything just works. It also has the additional advantage that because TURN servers have public IPs, you know you won't have to send OAP-DAP messages through the overlay. -Ekr _______________________________________________ P2PSIP mailing list [email protected] https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/p2psip
