11.26.06
Posted in Essays, naming/addressing at 7:06 pm by mbecchi
The question I want to address is the following: which, if any, would be the advantages of having geographic addressing in WANs? In order to analyze this problem, I will first summarize how routing is performed on WANs, what geographic routing is and in which context it has been deeply studied. The objective is to find out whether some of the requirements which motivated the idea of geographic routing apply also to WANs.
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Posted in Essays, naming/addressing at 7:05 pm by Sailesh Kumar
Network addressing and routing protocols have received enormous attention since the inception of the Internet. Any addressing scheme used in the Internet must serve three fundamental objectives: identity (so that end nodes can be identifiable), location (so that packets destined for the end nodes can be routed), and reachability (which links should be taken to route messages from one node to the other, note that in the current Internet, by default, every connected node is reachable).
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Posted in Essays, naming/addressing at 7:05 pm by BrandonHeller
The routers on today’s Internet forward packets based on the layout of the IP address, in a method called Longest Prefix Matching (LPM). Unfortunately, LPM becomes harder as line speeds get faster. Direct lookups are one method for LPM and complete in O(1) time, but would require an exorbitant 17GB of memory. Trie representation enables a tradeoff between memory and lookup speed, but is held back by the glacial pace of memory latency improvements, making trie lookup a challenge for rates greater than 10 Gbps. Ternary Content Addressable Memories (TCAMs) enable O(1) associative lookups, and thus line rate speeds, but are expensive and power-hungry. What if there was a method of addressing that could enable line-rate lookups with minimal memory, power, and cost?
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Posted in Essays, naming/addressing at 7:05 pm by Paul Moceri
Mobility is becoming a huge driving force on the Internet today. More and more mobile users connect to the Internet everyday through the use of laptops, PDA’s and smart phones. Applications that take advantage of this shift towards mobility are gaining popularity. It is also becoming apparent that having host location information available in the network can unlock a whole other class of applications. Already, applications exist that could benefit from the addition of location information to the network. Geographic location in WAN addressing would reach this goal of location information in the network to enable new services. In addition, geographic addressing has the added benefit of simplifying routing.
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11.20.06
Posted in Essays, naming/addressing at 8:15 am by Michael Roche
You are the owner of a small business and you are looking to advertise via email. You, like everyone else, hate spam mail so you do not want your advertising to be spam. There is such a great opportunity to advertise via email that you comply with CAN SPAM, which is a bill passed by Congress that list requirements to send unsolicited advertisments over email. This bill was signed into law to cut down on the amount of spam. So, you comply with CAN SPAM and your employees do a great job developing the advertisement. Everything is set to go. You send your email, but to your surprise it is not delivered to anyone on a major Internet Service Provider (ISP). You wonder what happened and decide to look into it in order to avoid this in the future.
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Posted in Essays, naming/addressing at 8:15 am by traviskeshav
In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet wonders ‘What’s in a name?’ Earlier, she also asks ‘Wherefore art thou Romeo?’ While these may be appropriate queries when speaking of the names of persons, in the realm of the Internet, there are many issues with naming, and it is not much ado about nothing. In the real world, names are of less importance, as we can easily distinguish people by their characteristics, even those persons with the same name. Such differentiation is much more difficult with the Internet, leading to many restrictions, as precise identification is a necessity. One’s known alias, a unique hostname, is resolved to the true identity, a unique IP address, by Domain Name Servers (DNS). And therein lies the problem, for this naming architecture can be abused in numerous ways, from thieves and con artists trying to masquerade as official businesses, to attackers attempting to amplify Denial of Service (DoS) assaults. The remainder of this essay will detail the numerous flaws with the current Internet naming system, demonstrating that once again, a common IP mechanism remains only out of necessity, rather than its greatness.
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Posted in Essays, naming/addressing at 8:15 am by charlie.wiseman
There can be no doubt that human-understandable names are necessary for the Internet to be useful to the broad population. After all, the vast majority of people need something easy to remember, like ‘www.yahoo.com‘, instead of some string of random-looking numbers. Having names also allows us to change the underlying mapping, as when a machine moves around, without affecting how the end users gain access to that machine. So, given that we want to attach (hopefully) meaningful names to entities on the Internet for ease of communication, we have to decide how to go about doing so. In this essay, I will argue that a single globally consistent system should be used.
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11.19.06
Posted in Essays, naming/addressing at 5:45 pm by harri
The Domain Name System (DNS) is the globally distributed database that maps human-readable domain names like “www.microsoft.com” or “wikipedia.org” into router-readable IP addresses such as 207.46.199.30 or 66.230.200.100. In fact it keeps a whole set of typed resource records for each domain name, such as the address of the mail exchange server for a domain or the reverse mapping from an IP address to its canonical (fully qualified) domain name. A large number of important Internet protocols, such as HTTP (the Web) and SMTP (e-mail), rely heavily on the global namespace served by DNS. Without DNS to map the “arl.wustl.edu” part of “http://arl.wustl.edu/~jst/reInventTheNet/” onto a routable address or the “cse.wustl.edu” part of “harri@cse.wustl.edu” to the appropriate e-mail server, the usability of today’s Internet would be much reduced. A later and interesting benefactor is the XML namespace extension [1], which uses DNS domain names primarily as a mechanism for disambiguating XML document typenames, while also exploiting the fact that the names point to hosts that can serve up the corresponding type definition files. Similarly, the Java package mechanism uses the same trick to preclude name clashes in the Java type hierarchy namespace.
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