The Routing Over Large Clouds Mailing List Archive by date

[Tim Salo <salo@msc.edu>]

In message <9510251808.AA16063@lobster.Newbridge.COM>, Joel Halpern writes:
> 	[...]
> This leads, to my thinking, to a document (the APR document under
> discussion) whcih discusses when one wants direct VCs.  The important
> observations (I think) are:
> 1) That the desire for direct VCs is not coupled to whether the source
>     and destination are in the same "address aggregate".  In particular, 
>     it is independent of whether they are in the same lowest level
>     "address aggregate" (traditionally known as "subnet").
>	[...]

For what it is worth, in "real world" ATM, there may be some relationship
between the desire for direct VCs and whether the source and destination
are topologically "near" each other.  In particular, SVCs are [perhaps
almost] possible in local ATM networks, but are not available in
wide-area ATM services provided by carriers.  When carriers provide
SVCs, users may want to have different criteria for using local- and
wide-area SVCs, particularly if one costs real money (darn intrusion of
the "real" world) and the other doesn't.

It is not clear to me how "SVCs exist," "SVCs don't exist," "SVCs are
free," and "SVCs cost money" map into "address aggregates."  On the
other hand, it is fairly clear to me that users, (if we asked them and
if they had a clue what we were talking about), would want to control
the portions of their topology over which SVCs were used.

-------

Note that Curtis' reply to Joel included:

> We're engineers.  We don't beleive in magic.  If you want magic
> implement MPOA.  ;-)

-tjs
MAGIC Gigabit Testbed