Item — HN Reader

> I don't see why we should be focusing all our engineering efforts on this one technological detail, tethering us forever to the idea that a license to speak on the Internet entails an IP address. There's 15+ years of research behind better networking topologies that care no more about IP addresses than a home router cares about Ethernet MAC addresses. Let's go that direction. It's easier, and probably better.

can you please elaborate on the above a bit ? bunch of pointers to papers would be most appreciated. thanks !

2 comments

A good place to start is RON, which is a MIT PDOS project that Frans Kaashoek and Robert Morris (that one) were involved in:

http://nms.csail.mit.edu/ron/

I had a funded startup in '99 doing this stuff (in our last year, we adapted the MIT Click Modular Router to the same idea).

Check out "A Layered Naming Architecture for the Internet". This is the paper we focused on in an Advanced Networking class when we talked about naming. It aggregates several key principles from the literature into one system. I haven't read the RON paper Thomas linked to, but based on a quick glance, I'd say both papers are definitely worth your time. The Naming paper is actually written by several of the same people who wrote or collaborated on RON.

Feel free to drop me an email if you want to discuss the Naming paper.

http://nms.csail.mit.edu/papers/index.php?detail=4