Michael, There is little doubt that the 'existing operational ecology' is a very suboptimal paradigm (4,5, or whatever-level). It is suboptimal for IPv4 and extremely suboptimal for IPv6. Kamoun and Klienrock were specific ) and Tanenbaum in his latest and greatest third edition agreed ) that a ln(N) hierarchical superstructure is optimal for large networks. They also conclude that path-length is 'not a real problem', just to be complete. BTW, and please do not take this in a negative way and I offer my apologies for the following diatribe: \begin{diatribe} Documenting 'the way things are' is nice for 'informational and historical' purposes. But, building new paradigms and structures on top of highly suboptimal and outdated architectures just added to the problem and does little to move society toward progress. Using the 'information RFC' logic below; we could easily apply the same logic to humankind. Crime, hatred, envy, greed, selfishness, etc. is 'the way human society exists' suboptimal and problematic. Why strive to build a better 'human network' when the 'informational human RFC' (IHRFC maybe ;-) clearly documents a very suboptimal civilization. Anyway, as I once had to learn and still learn every day, _opinions_ are not unique and everyone has at least five thousand of them, making _opinions_ noise with knowledge. Doing the background research, going back to the body of knowledge in the field and adding foundation to vision and opinion significantly decreases the noise level. \end{diatribe} Just think how effective NANOG or any group could be if all the working members took the time to learn the body of background knowledge others have left around as 'clues'. Best Regards, Tim
On Sun, 14 Apr 1996, Tim Bass wrote:
The simple idea for illumination in this post is simply; It is not A Good Idea to propose a concrete, structured four-level superstructure for the Internet (and we have not begin to look at IPv6, BTW).
Not proposing a 4-level hierarchical routing technology. Just describing the existing operational ecology using a 4-level metaphor as a proposed informational RFC.
Have a look at http://www.sidhe.memra.com/rough.txt if you want to see the rough draft.
Comments please.
Michael Dillon Voice: +1-604-546-8022 Memra Software Inc. Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com E-mail: michael@memra.com