Subject: [rrg] New Paper On Name-Oriented Sockets Interface

From: Christian Vogt <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Nov 2009 04:37:56 -0500

Dear all -

A few meetings ago, we had an interesting discussion on evolving the
traditional sockets interface towards one that is name-oriented.  A
significant part of the research group deemed this idea a candidate
solution to the routing scalability problem, since the resulting
identifier-locator separation would enable multi-homing and reduce the
cost of network renumbering.  I would like to point you to a paper that
elaborates on the name-oriented sockets interface, considering the
comments from the discussion we had:

http://christianvogt.mailup.net/pub/2009/vogt-2009-name-oriented-sockets.pdf

Your comments are welcome as usual.  Although the paper is yet to be
completed, it contains all major aspects of the solution proposed.

- Christian

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From: Dan Jen <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 21 Nov 2009 13:16:32 -0800

Hey Christian,

Long time no see.  Hope you are well.  I perused your proposal and I was
wondering if you could elaborate more on how this achieves the rrg
mission of scalability.

While I see how your proposal is attractive to applications developers,
how will it re-enable effective aggregation?  Not only will sites still
want PI addresses to avoid renumbering, but won't networks still wish to
announce more specifics for ingress TE purposes?  How does your proposal
address these concerns?  How will the routing table growth get
controlled?

Dan Jen

On Tue, 2009-11-10 at 04:37 -0500, Christian Vogt wrote:
> _______________________________________________
> rrg mailing list
> [email-masked]
> http://www.irtf.org/mailman/listinfo/rrg

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From: Christian Vogt <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 26 Nov 2009 21:01:17 -0500

On Nov 21, 2009, Dan Jen wrote:

> Hey Christian, long time no see.  Hope you are well.  I perused your
> proposal and I was wondering if you could elaborate more on how this
> achieves the rrg mission of scalability.

Hi Dan -

Your question is an important one, and I am sorry to let you wait so
long for a response.

I expect name-based sockets to mitigate the routing scalability problem
by helping reduce the number of edge networks that use provider-
independent addresses.  Provider-independent addresses are harder to get
and more expensive than provider-assigned addresses.  Yet many operators
desire provider-independent addresses nonetheless because they consider
the indirect cost of provider-assigned addresses higher.  Name-based
sockets reduce this indirect cost of provider-assigned addresses, and
hence make the use of provider-assigned addresses in lieu of provider-
independent addresses more acceptable.

The indirect cost of provider-assigned addresses comprises both,
difficulties to multi-home, and tedious and largely manual renumbering
upon provider changes.  There are three ways in which name-based sockets
reduce this indirect cost:  (1) They enable fine-granular and responsive
multi-homing.  (2) They simplify renumbering by offering an easy means
to replace IP addresses in referrals with domain names.  This helps
avoiding updates to application and operating system configurations,
scripts, and databases during renumbering.  (3) They facilitate low-cost
solutions that eliminate renumbering altogether.  One such low-cost
solution is address translation, which in combination with name-based
sockets loses its adverse impact on applications, in particular in IPv6.

Certainly, some edge networks will continue to insist on using provider-
independent addresses despite name-based sockets, perhaps simply due to
inertia.  But name-based sockets will help reducing the number of those
networks, and hence have a beneficial impact on routing scalability.

Does this make sense?

- Christian