I doubt that any one party can (or should) control the inter-domain path that a packet takes from some source site to some destination site through some non-trivial series of ASs.
What makes more sense, to me at least, is that the party forwarding the packet at a given moment makes its forwarding decision based on its local policy and the information available to it (RIB, FIB, packet header, and whatever else). That said, clearly it is reasonable for a destination to indicate a preferred ingress path (or a set of preferences for ingress) to the source. The source node then takes that information and applies its own local policy when creating and forwarding the packet initially. Routers along the path might usually be in several different domains, each with slightly different sets of reachabilities and policies. Provided the packet arrives, and we have some means of minimising issues with routing loops, that is sufficient. After all, the Internet is an unreliable datagram service. It is NOT a circuit and we ought not be trying to transform it into a circuit network. Circuit network technologies exist and folks are free to use those if they wish, but that is not the goal of the Internet. Yours, Ran -- 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
