On Fri, 12 Apr 2002, Patrick Thomas wrote: :I am looking for any and all research (and perhaps your comments), :references, etc. regarding replacements for the TCP/IP protocol that do :not require centralized authority structures (central authority to assign :network numbers). I think this could use some explaining, as 'centralized' is a pretty relative term, even in todays Internet. ARIN, APNIC, RIPE and others(?) would qualify as non-centralized, because there is more than just one of them. If you are in a geographic area served by one of them, then you might think it is centralized. I would say the same for DNS in its current mutation. However, from what I would speculate you are trying to find information on, you might want to look at the DoD protocol stack, decide what layer you really need this decentralized functionality on, and then see if existing P2P network technologies might fit your requirements. By looking for a network protocol that doesn't require registration authorities, or some sort of enrollment process which would manage addressing conflicts, you will run into one of two inevitable problems. The first being that to ensure reachability, you will need a lower layer protocol encapsulating your decentralized one (think of it as a social contract), as communications protocols aren't terribly useful when you can't see or talk to anyone. The second being that you will have to dispense with the possibility of unique identifiers, and accept the conflicts inherant in the collisions this causes. It is up to you to decide if this is consistent with the requirements of your protocol. Someone mentioned that people could simply generate their own "addresses" using public keys, which is theoretically possible, but we've seen how that works in usenet, where for one person to send an encrypted message to another, their message has to be propagated to absolutely everyone for the intended recipient to read it. It doesn't scale. Multicasting doesn't solve this either, as you have to register as part of a group to recieve the broadcasts. It's efficient, but you still have this issue of registration authorities to enroll you in a multicast group. So, as far as getting rid of centralized authority on a network, you just have to redefine "centralized" to mean something less abstract and more connected to the community of users, and redefine "authority" as a service instead of an administrator. You also have to decide what level you want that service to take place: Process, interface, segment, subnet, route, ASN, route, subnet, segment, interface, process. :) -- batz