Subject: Re: Regionally aggregatable address space for multihoming

From: Eric Gauthier <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2001 10:14:39 -0400

On Tue, Jun 05, 2001 at 09:28:30AM -0400, Jim Bound wrote:
> also for inter-planetary networks too. seriously I have people asking. 

For those who think he's kidding, check out this article from CNN.com
back in February of this year...

http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/internet/02/27/mars.network.office.idg/index.html

Or the NASA agency working on it:

http://marsnet.jpl.nasa.gov/

Eric :)

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From: [email-masked] (Sean Doran)
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 17:07:12 +0200 (CEST)

| Do you mean both the physical and topological proximity of the same entity,
| or just physical proximity for some entities and topological proximity for
| others?

Well, how about both?

I really meant "either" when I asked the question, but if a hybrid can
be proposed that simultaneously describes a position in physical space 
and a position in the network, obviously that would be interesting!

	Sean.

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From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2001 16:40:55 +0200 (West-Europa (zomertijd))

On Tue, 12 Jun 2001, RJ Atkinson wrote:

>         However, let me suggest that giving and disagreeing
> about examples aren't really the focus here, because the world 
> is a much larger place than the EU (or the US or AU for that 
> matter :-).

The point of the story is that a lot can change in five years.

>         The mere fact that in many places (not all, just many)
> local-loop charges are higher than long-distance charges means
> that the model we need must be economically sensible when the
> long-distance is less expensive than the local loop.

Long distance and local loop are really apples and oranges. From my living
room to New York is much, much more expensive than from my living room to the
other side of the city. However, from the Worldcom colocation building to New
York is probably cheaper than to the other side of the city. But from the
Worldcom colocation building to the Level3 colocation building is probably a
lot cheaper than from either to New York, and certainly than from Worldcom to
New York and then back to Level3.

And even if a connection over New York is cheaper, it is still possible to
exchange layer 3 local traffic over layer 1/2 long distance connections if
this keeps the routing table from exploding.

Iljitsch

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From: Iljitsch van Beijnum <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 12 Jun 2001 17:12:23 +0200 (West-Europa (zomertijd))

On Tue, 12 Jun 2001, RJ Atkinson wrote:

> At 07:49 12/06/01, Iljitsch van Beijnum wrote:
> >I guess this is true for the really large networks. Maybe this is 
> >because they've lacked a good incentive to interconnect at more 
> >locations. Geographic aggregation could be the necessary incentive. 
> >They  are already present in many locations and local fiber is cheap, 
> >so it could happen. On the other hand, it may not.

>         Local fibre is cheap in some places, expensive in others.

You are right, it can be expensive. I was thinking along the line of hardware
and investments. Obviously, for non-telco ISPs the market price is more
relevant.

>         Given that, I don't see how trying to force a local
> exchange system will be effective anytime soon.

Does anyone have a good overview of the current world wide situation? As far
as I can tell routing is pretty good these days, I hardly ever see packets
taking the scenic route halfway around Europe or the US these days. Of course
I see mostly traffic that has NL as the source or destination, so this
doesn't mean all that much.

>  And I don't
> necessarily think that forcing such will actually provide
> significant improvement.  I'm open minded about the latter,
> but would need to see more substantial explanation of how
> such actually improves the health of the global routing
> system

Well, let's reverse the argument: how will assigning very small blocks of
address space to multihomed networks with no particular rationale help us? At
least with a geographic assignment policy some people can filter some
announcements in some parts of their network some of the time.

As I see it, my original proposal (or the proposal by Tony Hain) aren't going
to fix all routing issues forever, because we have to plan for too many
multihomed networks (a billion) and we cannot depend on enough local
interconnectivity between ISPs. On the other hand, it should help a bit and
it won't break anything.

So we have to think of something better. I still think geography can be a
good "better than nothing" attribute when there is no better information
available, but we'll see.

Iljitsch

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From: [email-masked] (Sean Doran)
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2001 01:07:02 +0200 (CEST)

Randy Bush writes to Geoff Huston:

| > Randy, Do you have any suggestions as to an appropriate list to continue 
| > this discussion? Is ptomaine willing to tolerate a continuation of this 
| > discussion?
|
| i suspect 'encourage' would be a more appropriate word.

Swapping the WG hat for the RG hat, I invite you to discuss this
and ANY other Internet-routing-related topic on the open irtf-rr
interest list, details of which can be found at
http://www.irtf.org/charters/routing.html or 
http://puck.nether.net/irtf-rr/

Swapping back, multi6 is probably best off focusing on site 
multihoming for v6, although, Geoff, please bear in mind that it is
reasonable to argue that some form of traffic management 
might/ought to find its way into the forthcoming requirements draft,
or the forthcoming "how it's done in v4 today" draft, or both.

	Sean.