[e2e] Overly Overlay; Peer to peer is commonplace

[David P. Reed]

My reading: Chiappa and Vaidya think that graphs are fine for modeling the 
radio network medium.  Chiappa thinks this is best because the "real 
network" is the fixed fiber/wire network of relatively fixed topology, and 
radio is a mere peripheral, whose quirks are best unified into the 
underlying fixed network model.  And Huitema thinks that the best measure 
of promise of some of the ideas in the ad hoc networking community is the 
computational complexity of the algorithms they have managed to invent so 
far (by the way, the GRID technique scales as N log(N), as do some other 
approaches with high dynamicity that I know of).

My reaction is that this makes the Internet design abstractions brittle - 
unable to incorporate its next set of challenges (including mobility and 
other dynamics, and self-organizing evolution and provisioning) because of 
excess complexity from stretching the model.  (since I'm writing this, I 
say it reminds me of epicycles - you could model every orbit of a planet 
using perfect circles if you use enough of them).

It was indeed the case that epicycle-based models were *far* more accurate 
in predicting planetary motions for a long time before Newtonian models 
were properly fit.   (partly because epicycles had the freedom to introduce 
large numbers of correction terms to fit observation precisely).

I'm willing to take the risk that I'm wrong, here.  But are there others on 
this list who are willing to look at the big picture of routing and 
addressing and consider that there might be a lot of important things we 
don't understand yet about how to think about communications systems as a 
whole?


- David
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