Subject: [RRG] Address/prefix bunches

From: "Victor Grishchenko" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2007 17:19:33 +0500

Indeed, both Six/One and TAMARA ascend to 8+8 by O'Dell. So, please
consider the following as a friendly criticism.

In my opinion, the main shortcoming of the Six/One proposal is the
fact it sticks to the current technology and to the current business
practices (e.g. networks of PCs and access monopolies).

In particular, Six/One clearly separates transit and edge networks. At
the same time, even today, even single residential end-users tend to
multihome (see DLink's DI-LB604, the thing that brings you benefits of
shim6 right now for $115 plus delivery). Six/One accounts for some
ultimate "edge" typical in the network of PCs; as the world moves to
small connected devices, sensors, smart dust etc etc, the edge may
become virtually nonexistent (every PC may become a "provider" for a
zillion of little thingies). Again, even inside some today's "edge"
network one may easily find customers/businesses who want to
multihome.

As far as I can see, Six/One pads routing prefixes with link/subnet
IDs. This surely breaks any chance to apply prefix-bunch approach
recursively further.

I personally always remember that NAT is already here, it is cheap,
well-known and incrementally deployable. To make something of value we
must offer some real/general/fundamental advantage that will remain
actual for 10 years.
Why 10? Because e.g. the phrase "In the first phase, support for
Six/One will be introduced into hosts" costs ~10 years
(optimistically, 5). Will the problem still be actual in 10 years?
Will technology/business change?
Most surely, the playing field will change. Remember, what happened to
IPv6. Nobody can reiterate in 10-year cycles.

So finally, my point is: "there must be no edge".

                        Victor

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From: Christian Vogt <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2007 18:06:42 +0200

Victor,

you are certainly right that the nature of hosts and their way of
accessing the Internet is likely to be different in 10 years than it is
today.  And yes, the access topology may be more nested -- with hosts
more commonly providing access router functionality for other hosts.

But note that the "edge", as defined in the Six/One spec, won't be
affected by this development.  It describes the separation between flat
routing in the Internet core and hierarchical routing outside of it.
For scalability reasons, we will have this also in the future.

> IDs. This surely breaks any chance to apply prefix-bunch approach

I understand the scenario that you are describing, and I see why you
think of a recursive approach.  But note that the same scenarios can be
served also with non-recursive Six/One:  Propagate all prefixes to the
hosts and let them build their address bunches based on those.

- Christian