[e2e] It's all my fault

[Ken Calvert]

> The reality is, of course, that customers do not care about paths. They
> care about loss, end-to-end bandwidth and latency. So they actually pay
> money to ISPs to make routing decisions for them. This is called "division
> of labour".

The conflation of routing and forwarding in IP constrains 
the customer-provider relationship to the first hop, so the 
customer is stuck with whatever choice the ISP makes for all 
paths, no matter what.  And the fact that identity is 
entangled with location keeps the cost of "voting with one's 
wallet" artificially high.

Allowing source routing at the level of transit providers 
shifts the balance of power back toward the user. (See 
Xiaowei Yang's thesis.)

And it's not that millions of users want to specify the path 
their packets follow.  It's really about the interesting 
possibilities that cannot even be contemplated because of 
the lack of such a mechanism (and others needed to make it 
feasible).

KC
-- 
Ken Calvert, Associate Professor      Lab for Advanced Networking
calvert at netlab.uky.edu                     University of Kentucky
Tel: +1.859.257.6745                 Hardymon Building, 2nd Floor
Fax: +1.859.323.1971                              301 Rose Street
http://www.cs.uky.edu/~calvert/          Lexington, KY 40506-0495