CNN.com - WiFi activists on free Web crusade - Nov. 29, 2002 (fwd)

[David Howe]

at Monday, December 02, 2002 8:42 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> was
seen to say:
> No, an orthogonal identifier is sufficient. In fact, DNS loc would be
> a good start.
I think what I am trying to say is  -  given a "normal" internet user
using IPv4 software that wants to connect to someone "in the cloud", how
does he identify *to his software* the machine in the cloud if that
machine is not given a unique IP address? few if any IPv4 packages can
address anything more complex than a IPv4 dotted quad (or if given a DNS
name, will resolve same to a dotted quad)

> The system can negotiate whatever routing method it uses. If the node
> doesn't understand geographic routing, it falls back to legacy
> methods.
odds are good that "cloud" nodes will be fully aware of geographic
routing (there are obviously issues there though; given a node that is
geographically "closer" to the required destination, but does not have a
valid path to it, purely geographic routing will fail and fail badly; it
may also be that the optimum route is a longer but less congested (and
therefore higher bandwidth) path than the direct one.

For a mental image, imagine a circular "cloud" with a H shaped hole in
it; think about routing between the "pockets" at top and bottom of the
H, now imagine a narrow (low bandwidth) bridge across the crossbar
(which is a "high cost" path for traffic). How do you handle these two
cases?