I didn't see any comment on this question. Did I miss it?
Dave
On Thu, Dec 13, 2001 at 08:42:19AM -0800, Vince Fuller wrote:
>> > > 3.9 Rich Policy
>> ...
>> >
>> > One of the problems with this whole area is that I've attempted
>> > to come up with a good, useful, crisp, definition of policy
>> > that covers what people are trying to do today with 'policy'.
>> > Unfortunately, policy is one of those N! things -- get N people
>> > in a room and you get N! definitions of policy. The lack of
>> > specificity and crispness of this section may be, I fear,
>> > a reflection of similar lacks in deployed networks. The
>> > only real requirement might be "operators have to be able
>> > to reach in and diddle with things"...
>>
>> One question: is the next-generation routing system constrained to preserve
>> the pure hop-by-hop forwarding model that we've all grown to know and love?
>> I've read through section 3.9 of the draft so far between IETF sessions and
>> don't see anything that states that thus far.
>>
>> Why is this question relavent? Because it directly affects the set of
>> policies that can be supported and how those policies are applied. On
>> today's Internet, "policy" is primarily about setting the next hops that
>> traffic uses when it exits a particular domain, with brute-force methods
>> used to try and engineer end-to-end paths on a per-prefix granularity.
>> But this isn't really what providers of edge or transit services really
>> want; they want to be able to specify how traffic flows to the customers
>> of their service - those who pay more should get better service. In today's
>> world, the mapping between what the routing system can deliver and what
>> the services that ride on top of that system would like to see don't match
>> well at all, which is why horrible, non-scalable kludges such as more-
>> specific route propagation are used in the name of "traffic engineering".
>>
>> Is it within the scope of the next-generation routing system to solve this
>> problem or does that properly belong at layer-4 or above (which, I would
>> argue, is the only place that it can scalably be addressed, no pun intended,
>> today)?
>>
>> --Vince
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