On Tue, Mar 16, 2004 at 07:09:12PM -0600, Stephen Sprunk wrote:
When you add in the (assumed) requirements of backwards compatibility with
existing routers and hosts that don't implement a proposed extension, it
gets messy real quick.
The immediate handwave would be "Tunnel it." I'm not denigrating backwards
compatibility, but a lot of good work has relied on tunneling in the past,
e.g., Mbone and v6-v4. I'm currently waiting with baited breath the day
that service providers provide v6-to-v4 as the special case to v4-only
hosts.
HIP is a good start, but it's still only a BOF and the involvement is
nowhere near what one would expect for (IMHO) the most significant IETF
project since IPv6.
Must find more copious free time. Must find more copious free time.
While that's certainly interesting in its own right, what I think DARPA (and
the IETF) is looking for is something between the network and transport
layers, not something above transport.
You never know until you submit a proposal what DARPA **really** wants
even after you get through the program-speak. FLAPPS got funded for a while
under the Fault Tolerant Networks program, as did a lot of other research.
Might be that there are multiple shim layers between network and transport,
transport and application. That said, a lot of things can be solved in the
application layer (or adding thin layers underneath the app layer) because
adding them to the network and transport layer is less tractable. A good
example is multicast -- it works well and fits into the network layer but
the problems with routing protocols to get the distribution tree built turns
out to be a long IETF standards process exercise. Application-layer mcast
seems to be more of a winner than network-layer (just my perception, you
may now fire at will.)
In any case, it's fuel for interesting discussions.
-scooter