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

[Joe Touch]

See http://www.isi.edu/touch/pubs/draft-touch-tcp-portnames-00.txt

Port numbers are still useful to demultiplex multiple connections to the 
same service, e.g., multiple concurrent HTTP sessions. But there's no 
reason to couple the destination demultiplexer with the service name.

Joe

On 4/26/2013 2:01 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