Subject: [NSIS] Neighbors vs. peers

From: Bob Braden <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 1 Nov 2002 18:12:56 GMT

The charm of the English language, I have been told, is that it
has a very rich vocabulary (stolen ... err, adapted, from many other
languages!) with many subtle shades of meaning.  I am reminded of this
by the discussion of neighbors vs. peers.

Neighbor is a topological relationship, while peer is a power
relationship.  More concretely, nodes may be neighbors, while protocol
processing entities may be peers.  We sometimes fuzz the  distinction
between nodes and programs running in those nodes, but the distinction
is nevertheless real.

Thus, the revised version of my 2-level signaling document
contains the following sentence ["Johnny, use these two words in a
sentence!"]:

	Under the two-level architecture, corresponding [Upper Level
	Signaling Protoco]] modules in neighbor nodes are peers
	that communicate using the CSTP level.

What we discover directly is neighbors, as a topological fact.
This indirectly discovers peers, of course, but why be indirect
when you can be direct?

Bob Braden

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 4 Nov 2002 10:52:14 +0200

Hi Bob,

> This indirectly discovers peers, of course, but why be indirect

This sounds like a reasonable solution for the terminology.  If someone
has a problem with it, I expect that they have a better suggestion.

best regards,
John