> From: "Gray, Eric" <Eric.Gray@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> I think the "street address" analogy is not close enough - anymore
> than longitude and latitude numbers or any other description of
> physical location.
No, it's a very good analogy, because the road network is a very good analog
to the data network. To see how, let's do a though-experiment.
Embed the road-network, not on the surface of a solid sphere, but on the
surface of a flexible hollow spherical surface. Now, distort that surface
arbitrarily. The location (in spatial coordinates) of any place on that road
network has changed totally - but the set of directions you'd use to get
from one point in the road network to another ("go down road A until you
meet the junction with B, and turn onto B in the direction of C", etc, etc)
remains unchanged.
What is most important about both the data network, and the road network, is
the *connectivity pattern* - what connects to what. That's because packets
are (usually) constrained to travel down links, and vehicles are (usually)
constrained to travel down roads.
> The problem with physical location portability is that the location
> remains even if you're not in it.
But the exact same thing is true of a network - Port #0 on ISP A's router R
is the same place in the network (i.e. you use the same directions to get to
it - see above) whether company X or company Y is plugged in there - just as
126 Main Street is the same building, whether company X or company Y is
housed there.
> Number assignments, however are substantially more portable.
Saying that doesn't make it so. You can easily (sic) change street names
too, to make a street name "portable".
> It is certainly possible for an IPv6 address pool manager to allocate
> personalized IPv6 addresses from an IPv6 address pool that they manage
> and thereby assume responsibility for end-delivery
That's just a translation service from *virtual* addresses to real ones -
those IPv6 "addresses" aren't the names of locations in the network: if the
pool manager *actually wants to get packets* to those entities, it is going
to have to translate those "addresses" into the real addresses at which
those entities can be found.
Noel
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