If we are willing to accept arbitrarily long paths to get from point
A to point B, there are techniques which allow topologically
insensitive packet handling. The Home-Register (aka HLR lookup) is
one way. (The routing reserachers have described this topic as
"stretch > 1" routing. There are many non-deployable ideas
there. If we really didn't care about path distortion at all, I am
sure something deployable could be crafted.)
Note however that local number portability is actually a bad
analogy. The phone system internally does not work on phone numbers
any more (it once did). Your phone number is really more akin to an
identity. Phone you call someone, the system does a name lookup (ala
DNS) and then gets a routable location.
Yours,
Joel
At 10:48 AM 3/28/2006, Gray, Eric wrote:
To: jnc(_at_)mercury(_dot_)lcs(_dot_)mit(_dot_)edu, ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: RE: Stupid NAT tricks and how to stop them.
Noel,
I think the "street address" analogy is not close
enough - anymore than longitude and latitude numbers or
any other description of physical location.
The problem with physical location portability is
that the location remains even if you're not in it. So
someone else might need to describe their own physical
location using the same description.
Number assignments, however are substantially more
portable.
It is certainly possible for an IPv6 address pool
manager to allocate personalized IPv6 addresses from an
IPv6 address pool that they manage and thereby assume
responsibility for end-delivery (by any means possible)
- thus providing for indefinite address portability.
In this sense, this is more analogous to phone number
portability or tax identifiers.
--
Eric
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