[e2e] flat (was Re: Port numbers in the network layer?

[Kevin Mason]

While interesting, what would be the absolute benefit?  The possibilities for confusion by mis-spelling alone would negate most of the gain.  Plus switching variable length, essentially random character socket indicators would be a huge overhead.

~Kevin


On Apr 26, 2013, at 5:01 PM, christian.tschudin at unibas.ch wrote:

> On Fri, 26 Apr 2013, Detlef Bosau wrote:
> 
>> ... port numbers on the transport layer have worked fine for about 35 years now. (Is this correct?) So there must be extremely compelling reasons to restart this discussion.
> 
> the past not being the reason, the reason must lie in the future,
> which is: no ports at all, and names instead of port numbers.
> 
> If at Bob's time ports were chosen to be encoded in ASCIZ instead
> of a 16 bit integer, many nice conflations would have been possible,
> architectural IP oddities cleaned up, connectionless web servers
> at IP level could have emerged and the bang path would still be
> with us.
> 
> Some fun addr+"port" examples for such a one-layer IP network:
> 
> 10.0.0.1:ping?reply-to=my_asciz_name_instead_of_port_here
> 10.0.0.2:echo?say=look at me look at me I'm on e2e
> 127.0.0.1:/index.html
> 0.0.0.0:arp?who-has=192.168.1.1&tell=eth(27:18:28:18:28:45):me
> 192.168.1.1:dns?www.google.com&t=mx
> 192.168.1.1:!my:path!to:the!open:dns?holy.cow
> 192.168.1.1:eval(dns?www.google.com)!i_feel_lucky?but I forgot the question
> 
> Port-less is not really new and links back to Bob: it's an instance
> of a role based architecture, makes the world look flat again,
> like SDN.
> 
> best, christian
> 
> ---
> Prof. Dr. Christian F. Tschudin
> Uni Basel | Head of Dept of Mathematics and Computer Science