[e2e] node addresses vs. interface addresses

[Joe Touch]

J. Noel Chiappa wrote:
>     > From: Joe Touch <touch at ISI.EDU>
> 
> Now that I've thought this through a little bit more, I came up with a
> different way to characterize your scheme. (For both variants: i) use host
> routes over a limited scope, and ii) use tunnels.)
> 
>     >> The alternative to loading everybody with the problem is to shift the
>     >> load to the multihomed host and its peers.
> 
>     > Hiding it _does_ shift the load to the multihomed host and its peers.
>     > See the paper for details.
> 
> These schemes are both geared toward what some call "host multi-homing" -
> i.e. a single host has two interfaces - and usually both connections are
> within a fairly small scope of the connectivity topology.
> 
> Alas, that's not what most multi-homing users want; they want "site
> multi-homing", where some organization (typically a company) wants robust
> service and so is connected twice to the rest of the Internet fabric; these
> connections are usually widely separated in the topology (typically by
> signing up with two different ISP's).
> 
> The "use host routes over a limited scope" clearly doesn't work there - the
> problem is having the distant parties send their packets to the right ISP
> to even get to the site - i.e. the same old multi-homing problem.

All that's needed is a way for the remote host to know how to bootstrap 
a connection. That can be done via the DNS - i.e., I can give you my 
hidden endpoint address, as well as a set of route-through tunnel 
endpoints. Those route-throughs are needed only until the handshake 
completes, at which point endpoint routing protocols take over.

That can be accomplished with encapsulation with existing protocols, 
both network and transport. It's a slight modification of the endpoints, 
to create the tunnel and use it statically through the route-through 
endpoints, but you need that anyway as a place in which to run the 
routing protocol between the endpoints.

Note that only the endpoints run the routing protocol in this case.

Joe