> From: Robin Whittle <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Here is a list of objections to any routing scaling solution which
> pushes work relating to multihoming, TE and changing ISPs onto hosts.
> Extra host traffic
> Host operation more affected by packet loss
> Increased cost and reliability problems
> for mobile hosts operating over wireless
> Extra complexity in the host
> ...
> General principle of solving a problem close
> to its origin
A very similar list of objections could (and probably was, that discussion
would have been slightly before my time) have been raised to doing
reliability (retransmission, etc) in the hosts, back in the day (i.e. early
70's); as many will no doubt recall, in early networking (ARPANet, X.25),
reliability was the responsibility of the network, not the hosts.
Yet today we do reliability in the hosts, and to most people it's 'obvious'
that that's the right thing....
> add architectural elements to the network to solve its scaling problem
> when millions of end-user networks need portability, multihoming and TE.
It's not clear to me what you mean by "[in] the network", in saying the
above.
If you mean by this to put a function in the first-hop router, instead of the
host, that is not going to really change things like the capabilities (e.g.
response time) or cost (e.g. overhead in terms of number of packets needed to
run the mechanism). It may be more practical (less boxes to modify), but
that's all - and that more speaks to the deployment path, than the basic
architecture (e.g. deploy it in first-hop routers to start with, but
eventually it should migrate into the hosts).
(To me, 'extra complexity in the hosts' as a reason to not put something in
the hosts is a bit of a non-starter: most of the recurring costs, in terms of
code size, etc are trivial, given current OS sizes; and the non-recurring
costs, such as engineering time to write the code, are amortized over so many
hosts they are also not too significant.)
Do we agree that by "[in] the network", one cannot possibly mean 'have the
path selection do it', because it is precisely the case of "millions of
end-user [small entities]" which _cannot_ be supported in the path selection?
Noel
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