Alex,
> Following this line, is it possible to imagine an architecture where
> addresses are topologically significant and prefixes are also
> topologically significant? And then having a mechanism for
> name-to-prefix mapping?
>
> I might be far off from what "topologically significant" means
> exactly.
I smell a MONET discussion here ;)
As explained by others, a prefix is an aggregated form
of address information at the routing level, so if a given
address is topologically significant, it is logical to
expect prefixes to have this property as well.
(In fact, topological address assignment may presume a reverse
dependency, i.e., addresses assigned based on routing hierarchy,
rather than using routing hierarchy to try to aggregate already
laid down addresses, but that's a separate topic.)
Regarding name-to-prefix mapping...
A name and an address are properties of a specific node,
similarly to a DNS-name and IP address. I guess for MONET,
one could envision something like part of name being a
group id and its mapping to a prefix changing dynamically,
while the rest is a host id and its mapping to the rest
of address being more stable... but then I might not have
had enough of my morning tea...
Alex
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Aug 04 2003 - 04:10:04 EDT