Subject: Address proximity gauging

From: John Wells <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 31 May 2001 19:10:37 +0200

Hello all,

I'm in a bit of a quandary.  Given an correspondant address, and an array
of servers, how do I choose the server the closest to the correspondant ?  All
of this is with IPv6.  The only thing I can think of is longest prefix
matching, and this is sure to work for prefixes of /48 and /64 (i.e. given
matches at those lengths, one would be sure that the server is within the same
site and subnet respectively), but less than that it seems it's anything goes.
For example, at INRIA we have a /41 shared between sites scattered about
France:  near Paris, at Grenoble, and near Nice for example.

Does anyone have any ideas about how to determine the proximity of two
addresses?  Any ideas are welcome.

Thanks,

John Wells

-- 
John WELLS
INRIA Rhône-Alpes, Planète Project - ENSIMAG 3A/Télécomm et Réseaux
Virginia Tech Networking and Visualization Lab
PGP Public key: http://www.inrialpes.fr/planete/people/wells/pgpkey.txt