3 ms·

Or... hear me out: variable length, ideally with support for ascii or other encodings allowing human readable addresses ( no dns!) and routing done using top le

by _8j50 3y ago

Or... hear me out: variable length, ideally with support for ascii or other encodings allowing human readable addresses ( no dns!) and routing done using top level addresses. "AAA.CA" becomes 4143.414141, routers will find the best route for 4143 and anycast ti 414141.<more specific address>, the apex AAA in this case would also be the ASN equivalent for bgp type routing and the TLD CA would also be the PKI certificate authority used to validate both routing updates and address ownership by the applications on either end. No port numbers either, the full address should describe the layer4+ addresses, so the full address user types instead of https://AAA.CA:8443 https://AAA.CA:8443, it becomes HTTPS.8443..AAA.CA (.. meaning anycast to the closest endpoint). A good protocol is the easy part, the hard part is getting all the big networking companies and their engineers to agree on something.

jandrese 3y ago
The hard part is handling variable length addresses fast in hardware. Historically there has always been a sizeable speed penalty for making hardware deal with variable length anything.
- _8j50 3y ago
  That's why you make addressing hierarchial. With IP it was one address, 16bitx2 addressing will be fixed for the purpose of routing in that it either looks at the top level 16bit and decides the route to choose or for core routers, the destination keeps the other end of the address space in the routing table,again 16x2 on core/transit and just 16 for LAN/Host routing (higher order 16bit addresses each get their own RT, scaling as needed). Routing becomes a fast two step process ("i have a table for that, then let me lookup the route" or "I don't have the table, default route or drop"). For that small cost of additional RT lookup and memory you get faster lookups and comparisons (16 vs 32bit) and you can get small routers that support as little as 65k routes cheal for small sites and stack/scale that to meet demand. So R1 gets the packet, looks at the first 16bit and decides which R3 has the RT for that and forwards it, R3 looks at only the second 16bit due to it's role in the stack and forwards it elsewhere. Internet routers will do the most work since they will do multiple (but predictable and limited since it scales exponentially) lookups then downstream looks up less and less until the actual application gets it. 16bit to support utf16. Arbitrary length but fixed hierarchial address partitioning.

by _8j50 3y ago

jandrese 3y ago

The hard part is handling variable length addresses fast in hardware. Historically there has always been a sizeable speed penalty for making hardware deal with variable length anything.

_8j50 3y ago
That's why you make addressing hierarchial. With IP it was one address, 16bitx2 addressing will be fixed for the purpose of routing in that it either looks at the top level 16bit and decides the route to choose or for core routers, the destination keeps the other end of the address space in the routing table,again 16x2 on core/transit and just 16 for LAN/Host routing (higher order 16bit addresses each get their own RT, scaling as needed). Routing becomes a fast two step process ("i have a table for that, then let me lookup the route" or "I don't have the table, default route or drop"). For that small cost of additional RT lookup and memory you get faster lookups and comparisons (16 vs 32bit) and you can get small routers that support as little as 65k routes cheal for small sites and stack/scale that to meet demand. So R1 gets the packet, looks at the first 16bit and decides which R3 has the RT for that and forwards it, R3 looks at only the second 16bit due to it's role in the stack and forwards it elsewhere. Internet routers will do the most work since they will do multiple (but predictable and limited since it scales exponentially) lookups then downstream looks up less and less until the actual application gets it. 16bit to support utf16. Arbitrary length but fixed hierarchial address partitioning.