Subject: [RAM] Re: Re/directed: [arch-d] It's the routing, people!

From: [email-masked] (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2006 11:58:31 -0500 (EST)

> From: [email-masked]

    > Would geo-topo addressing be more palatable

First, I'd like to encourage everyone to stop using the word "address"
(except where explicitly modified as "IPvN address"). The generic term has
just too many meanings (routing-name, old location&identity semantics, packet
header field, etc, etc) and it's just too easy to get confused about what
someone means if you read "address" and think something different from the
person who typed it.

  "I am far from thinking that nomenclature is a remedy for every defect in
  art or science: still I cannot but feel that confusion of terms generally
  springs from, and always leads to, confusion of ideas." 

	-- John Louis Petit, "Architectural Studies in France", 1854

I am trying to observe this suggestion to not use the word myself, but don't
always succeed.

Second, this idea (geographic "addressing") keeps being "re-discovered" by
people who wonder why we aren't doing it. (I had a sarcastic rhetorical
answer to that ready, but omitted it.)

The short answer is that the routing-names have to be organized according to
the network's actual connectivity to allow the routing to scale (the latter
being the problem we are trying to solve). If you cannot make connectivity
follow geo-"addressing", a geo-based organizing principle for organizing
routing-names is unable to help the routing scale.

Generally connectivity follows traffic patterns, *not* political or
geographic boundaries. And the organization of routing-names has to follow
that.

    > the market may well take care of routing and addressing concerns by
    > driving regional/national network economies back into the shapes they
    > had before the early/mid-1990s, when addressing, topology, and traffic
    > exchange were quite explicitly geo-topo

"Addressing" and topology were never "geo-topo". IPv4 address patterns have
always been a major dog's breakfast, although it's gone through various
stages (the earliest - when the network was small, not coincidentally -
having no organization at all).

Although there remains to this day (and probably always will) some geographic
influences on connection, especially towards the edges (it's basically a lot
cheaper to connect to a POP that's physically near you), there are a high
percentage of links that break that paradigm (see previous comment about
connectivity following traffic patterns).

	Noel

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---

From: Jefsey_Morfin <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2006 22:34:15 +0100

>I am trying to observe this suggestion to not use the word myself, but don't

This is typical problem from using English we know well. English is 
more an horizontal language which permits quick debugging with people 
meaning different things with the same words. French is a more 
vertical language which requires a better common understanding of a 
problem before discussing it with more precise words. These bottom up 
vs. Cartesian differences dramatically helps the ISO process. A  good 
way to produce a document is to discuss it in English and to 
translate in French and to review them one from the other (ISO, MPEG, 
etc. experience is very interesting).

English has an advantage on French: it can do more easily what you 
request and French intellectuals adore: to define issues more 
precisely through a contextual nomenclature. However, this is not 
common to English speakers. So, except if you want this debate to be 
in French, I would suggest you help us in establishing a site with 
your own suggested nomenclature of the different types of "addresses".

This would probably help a lot both clarifying the issue and your own 
interesting research about what are we really addressing?

>geographic boundaries. And the organization of routing-names has to follow

I am afraid you jump too fast to the geographic nature of the 
"geo-addressing". As I reminded it, there are four phases in a 
network: development, topology driven numbering, numbering plan 
driven topology, and transition. What actually commands is the market.
- in the development phase the market says if it is interested or not.
- in the deployment phase one follows the market development
- in the maturity phase the network continuity must be everywhere and 
follows the real criteria: human/cpu density which is usually 
described through the numbering scheme. It is not geographic, but 
demographic (actually today demomecanographic), which in turn is 
geographic, historic, climatologic, etc.
- in the transition phase, the market has decided to deprecate the 
technology and the demo-based plan is usually easier to transition.

>connectivity following traffic patterns).

Please do not make the mistake you want to avoid. Numbering has 
nothing to do with fluxes. The most important traffic is probably 
between USA and Europe. You only need one US and one European block 
to support the traffic between people in the USA and people in 
Europe. While you will also need one addressing block for people in 
Tonga. Not because Tonga should be treated as a geographical zone, 
but because Tonga will be an equal topology hub even if the link and 
traffic is far lower.

jfc

---

From: David Meyer <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Nov 2006 14:14:05 -0800

Jefsey,

	Please, note that this list is not about language
	issues. I know there are plenty of lists were we can have
	productive discussions about those issues. Let's try to
	keep this one to the issues I mentioned in the creation
	of the list, ok? Just a review here:

We've created a new list, the Routing and Addressing Mailing list
([email-masked]), which is reserved for the IETF community's
discussion of the analysis of and potential solutions to the
continued growth in the size and dynamics of the Internet's
default free zone routing table.

	Its much appreciated.

	thnx,

	--dmm

---

From: Jefsey_Morfin <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2006 02:48:35 +0100

>default free zone routing table.

Dear David,
I suggest you reread what Noel quoted and what I wrote.

Noel has a very pertinent analysis that routing is the issue, but 
that it cannot be analysed correctly if there is a language confusion 
about what an address may mean. Look at the debate on "nodes", which 
will lead to "nodes of what". So he asks that we do not use the word 
and try using more precise words. To support that he quotes the 
example of the French thinking approach which is built in a French 
language supported cartesian point of view, to use a nomenclature.

It is very much like if you program the same function in Basic or in 
C, you need to declare the variable in C, what is a constraint you do 
not have in Basic but you can support.

We currently have an in depth analysis at the French IPv6 TF on the 
necessary work implied by this very topic and the impact on the IPv6 
market interest, technical deployment, and on the very Internet 
structural architecture. For example, do we need Internet wide 
addresses  (something shared in the idea that only networks should 
have an address), what might permit to keep IPv4 if necessary due to 
time pressure, and to consider an IPv4+ solution as a longer 
transition to IPv6 (where the "+" might represent many things 
precisely to discuss). I documented my own proposition. I do not say 
it is a good one, but I am surprised I never saw it proposed anywhere.

This debate shows a very neat split between some of us sharing the 
IETF culture, and others approaching the problem in what I would call 
a more usual cartesian way. This happens to be productive on both 
sides (something we commonly observe at ISO or other plurilingual 
fora, and others of our MPEG members also report). What is 
interesting is that what Noel suggests is exactly to try to focus on 
what we consider as our very starter. From experience this is very 
unusual : and probably why only a few French engineers share in the 
IETF work. Our culture lead us to think more like Noel or John Days often do.

Yesterday a very documented proposition from one of the TF members 
was to start a WG about it, and he proposed to take that load. The 
charter would be to understand with periodical review every 6 months 
"what is an address, technically, architecturally, in peoples mind, 
for applications, for current R&D, in the various multilateral 
approaches of the digital ecosystem evolutions and convergences". 
IMHO this is a topic where CJK people could very interestingly 
contribute because their culture, thinking and experience are more 
exposed than others to the manipulation of addressable concepts 
(ideograms) which is certainly an important part of addressing 
(handles, metadata, registries).

I will not explain to the co-author of RFC 3439 that the first thing 
to do is to explore how to split the problems to reduce them. And 
that this is in this process that you can best identify where 
something does not scale. And that this is in the basic smallest 
errors that usually lay the biggest problems. From experience I 
observed that many of these small errors were semantic, confusing 
several concepts as being a single one, or not documenting a concept 
people believe they share. And rather than being a problem of 
amplification due to the size of the system it is simply a statistic 
increase of the chances of this inner conflict being exposed with 
results related to the size of the system. From IETF experience, I 
now know that this approximation amplification effect is very common 
in the IETF and I suspect that we face it in here.

What is appealing in Noel's proposition, if he can carry what I 
suggest him, is that building a nomenclature with some simple method 
will start several sub-debates. With probably several parallel 
propositions for different needs (and more chances to workout a 
comprehensive, stable, and long term solution). Not a single solution 
for all the needs, what is IMHO the real limit of the Internet 
technology. A idea most around me think simple and obvious, and I 
have an obvious difficulty to make understood at the IETF. Don't 
rush, we are in hurry.

jfc

> > >I am trying to observe this suggestion to not use the word myself, but
> > >don't > >always succeed.
> >

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 18 Nov 2006 20:51:47 -0500

> I am trying to observe this suggestion to not use the word myself,  

Duly noted. I think a similar clarification for "connectivity" and  
"general connectivity" (which you subbed in for my "transport") would  
be similarly useful.

> answer to that ready, but omitted it.)

Thanks for that indulgence ;-)
I'm not entirely ignorant of the earlier "rediscoveries," just  
inquiring about the relevance of possibly old ideas in light of (what  
seems to me) a possibly new context.

> having no organization at all).

Before 1976, commercial use of generic private line services by non- 
PSTNs was legal in exactly zero countries, and such use still remains  
at best expensive and difficult in maybe 50+% of the countries on  
Earth. In the other times/places, general connectivity and topology  
follows patterns that were/are explicitly molded by national  
regulatory borders/rules. So that "always" is both pretty shallow and  
highly qualified. (From my own latecomer/outsider perspective, the  
legal change that made such use possible looks like the main reason  
why multihoming later become both possible and necessary).

It goes without saying that the dog's breakfast view is the accepted  
wisdom. However, direct experience in odd places around the world,  
followed by too much scrutiny of the Route Views record gives me the  
impression that the breakfast has a very strong national flavor in  
many cases. Some observations from the latter:

1. After adjusting (to the best of my abilities) for historical and  
structural (HD) differences, distribution of public routed IP across  
public ASes is on average more concentrated today than it was in 1997  
in maybe 1/3 of the "national network economies" (NNEs) for which  
data is available (NNE being the sum of ASes associated via whois  
with a specific ISO3166 country code). To me this implies that  
default route options are probably growing slower than the overall  
Internet for many places, and the people stuck there.

2. The share of ASes that have at least one publicly observable  
domestic adjacency (same AS-level country codes) *and* at least one  
publicly observable cross-border adjacency is lower today than it was  
in 1997 in about 1/5 of NNEs. If these are the primary "dogs", they  
don't seem to be growing/expanding fast enough to sustain the  
Internet-as-spaghetti view.

3. In1997, national-level concentration of cross-border AS  
adjacencies was high enough to raise concerns in 59/95 NNEs -- 44 of  
which would have been no-brainers for intervention -- if anyone  
obliged to have such concerns had known how to look. Today there are  
almost twice as many NNEs (countries which have been voluntarily  
identified as "home" by at least one AS), but cross-border  
adjacencies are 100% monopolized in 41 of them. In any other economic  
sector, another 68 would also be getting a very hard look.

Granted, the remaining 60-70 NNEs together constitute the majority of  
the publicly observable Internet (to date). Granted, differential  
domestic/international growth rates are properly regarded as evidence  
of great success in those economies; some combination of factors is  
making the Internet boom in those places. But to me all of this just  
reinforces my original point that geography (or geopolitical  
boundaries) are not irrelevant, and reaffirms my original belief that  
the contractionary future scenario also represents a risk deserving  
of consideration.

> connectivity following traffic patterns).

In November 1997, cross-border AS adjacencies represented 27%  
(1486/5355) of unique AS-to-AS adjacencies from the vantage point of  
Route Views data contributors. On November 1, 2006, the equivalent  
percentage was 29% (14862/50559). So the percentage is high, I guess,  
but not really changing much...
Perhaps there are lots more completely invisible private cross-border  
networks now -- but what difference could that make to routing-names  
for the the rest of us?

Tom