On Fri, 27 Feb 2004, Alex Bligh wrote:
Anycast topology tends to follow AS topology, as people prefer their own routes.
Indeed yes.
routes. If you take a rural situation where you have your nearest (geographically) E911 service on some long link into Sprint, and the customer on some long link into UUnet, it is most unlikely they will be close (network wise)
Indeed. But who said anything about having anycast addresses routed /that/ widely? The anycast address can simply be the well-known 'emergency service' address. It can then be up to each service provider to route calls from customers to the appropriate emergency service provider. Eg, in your example above, if we decide we do not want to put the onus on customers to configure their 911 service, then UUNet are in the best position, indeed noone else is in a better position, to know that $long-haul-customer is located in Ruralville, so UUNet's E911 'switch' would need to have a table of (customer or POP) -> (appropriate emergency service provider). UUNet can deploy as many or as few of these switches/gateways as they want. Ie, anycast == well-known-address, every VoIP phone could be pre-configured with it even. From users POV, it'd just work presuming the network provider does the needed work. Even for mobile users. And even if they dont, it would still allow for the provision of public emergency service switches/gateways as a fallback which have some chance of being on the same continent, occasionally even the same country, where a 'best guess' could be made (eg by looking to see whether the inetnum for the source has a country: attribute or by some other IP->locality mapping technology). This presumes SIP has the facilities to support the needed gatewaying/redirection.
Anycast is arguable good for finding the best *connected* (i.e. closest using a network metric) server,
Indeed, however you are presuming the servers are far and few between. It need not be.
need to. For E911, it does.
Yes of course. Difficult problem though. And the best place to decide is as close to the person making the call as possible.
Alex
regards, -- Paul Jakma paul@clubi.ie paul@jakma.org Key ID: 64A2FF6A warning: do not ever send email to spam@dishone.st Fortune: Use what talents you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best. -- Henry Van Dyke