Hi Russ, I don't think of my Ivip ITR-ETR proposal as a locator-ID separation protocol, though it could be viewed that way. Nor does this proposal rely much on a hard separation between ISPs and end-users.
The idea is that Ivip will provide some areas of the address space with new capabilities, and certain restrictions. Using terminology from http://psg.com/lists/rrg/2007/msg00533.html, a BGP advertised prefix controlled by Ivip is a "Mapped Address Block" (MAB) which can be split into any number of "micronets". Packets addressed to each micronet are sent to a particular ETR, anywhere in the world, and (ideally) this mapping will be changeable with little cost, within a few seconds, to any other ETR. Micronet address space can't be used for certain things: ETRs Anything to do with the Ivip infrastructure Root and probably TLD nameservers BGP routers So micronet space is not suitable for the primary address space of an ISP. However, an ISP would be able to place its public-facing web servers on micronet addresses. I am not sure why the ISP would want to, but there may be reasons. Also, there are certain restrictions on where ITRs and ETRs can be located, such as not behind NAT. Administratively, people who use micronets have a different arrangement and set of dependencies than they would if they had PI space today. The primary difference is that they don't need BGP expertise, to be a member of an RIR etc. - so it would be much less expensive. Also, micronets can be assigned to different end users without any impact on BGP - saving a great deal of administrative costs and inertia. In some ways, it would be like getting PA space from an ISP, but the space would be usable via any ISP which provides an ETR. More on this in: http://psg.com/lists/rrg/2007/msg00536.html The main benefit is that micronets can be of any size, from 1 IP address to any number of them - compared to the effective 256 address granularity of the current and likely future IPv4 BGP system. Ivip enables a much finer, faster, cheaper, slicing and dicing of address space - including (ideally) for mobility with generally optimal path lengths - without requiring more BGP advertised prefixes (other than one for every MAB) and without involving the BPG system in any changes to advertised prefixes when the micronets are mapped somewhere different. This obviously has lots of uses - including enabling millions of end-user networks to be multihomed with their own genuinely portable address space. One benefit is that IPv4 address space will be able to be more efficiently used, in terms of number of actually used addresses and in terms of a greater number of separate multihomed end-user networks. I think the other proposals - LISP, eFIT-APT and TRRP - can in principle be used in the same way. They may be presented in a more mathematically defined way, such as "Locator ID Separation". These other proposals are not aimed so much at better address utilisation, but I think they could all be used to achieve this. Generally, micronets are useful for an "end-user" - someone who wants Internet access but doesn't sell Internet access to others in a big way. As you write, many organisations known as ISPs also do things which do not involve selling Internet access - so they may find micronets useful for some of those activities. - Robin http://www.firstpr.com.au/ip/ivip/ -- to unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word 'unsubscribe' in a single line as the message text body. archive: <http://psg.com/lists/rrg/> & ftp://psg.com/pub/lists/rrg
