[Nml-wg] About modelisation of the network description

[Aaron Brown]

Evangelos Chaniotakis wrote:
> Disadvantage: It'll be a bit more cumbersome to look things up - users 
> won't
> be able to just look at an id and immediately know stuff about it. But 
> well, we'll
> have identifier lookup services and tools for that.
The issue I have with meaningless, globally-unique names comes in 
constructing the lookup service. If we have one global lookup service, 
it's easy. If i want to know about a random id, i lookup the id in that 
central service to find the authoritative topology service for that 
element, and then I go look up the element's information there. That 
centralized lookup service will have tremendous issues scaling, so we'd 
need to distribute the lookups. Since the IDs are completely random, to 
do that even somewhat feasibly, we'd have to use a DHT as the lookup 
service, and no matter what, every element in every domain would need to 
be in the DHT.

If we just did the "domain:uuid", each lookup service could keep the 
authoritative topology service for a given domain which would be an 
insignificant amount of information compared to having to know the 
authoritative topology service for every element in every domain. As 
soon as we define a semi-hierarchical identifier like that (and if 
administrators want to only define the semi-hierarchy, that's fine), we 
should think about how users might define a more strict hierarchy so 
if/when they do it, the approach will be standardized across domains.

Cheers,
Aaron