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by merlyn 1131 days ago
IPv4 today is a totally different paradigm than what IPv4 was in the 1980's and early 1990's.

IPng (IPv6) was designed when the original paradigm existed, not what we have now-a-days.

So, if we actually had been on track to do IPv6 in the decade it was defined, we could have gone a totally different way. Instead due to the rapid growth of the Internet in the mid 90's, IPv4 was morphed into something different and IPv6 had its own model until we started to need it again.
1 comments
astrange 1131 days ago
IPv6 itself isn't the right thing for mobile internet either; people expect their IP address to not change when they migrate towers, meaning the entire approach to routing doesn't work.
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hughesjj 1131 days ago
Isn't it like literally a data structure issue though? Like you have to route on prefixes? Like how else would you know where to go?

Ip routing is kind of like a tree (not a graph) in the ip regards, how would you get around it?

I admittedly don't know as much as I'd like about network, hence why I'm posing this question ;-)

If theres a way to efficiently model hierarchical domains for stuff like DNS/IP i'd love to know. Like, consistent hash rings maybe, but then we'd be reintroducing ring topologies...

Oh wait duh though. A cell tower is owned by a single company. Yeah that's prolly doable, the company can always buy beefier routers if they need the memory. And realistically speaking the virtual tree could be closely aligned to the physical one given how cell towers work.

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somat 1130 days ago
The way it is done is to have an invisible layer underneath (mpls perhaps) that can do the routing.

However the correct ip way to do it would to have tcp(layer 4) decoupled from ip(layer 3) such that an ip address could change while maintaining the tcp stream. unfortunately this was not done, tcp has too many layer violations and is firmly interlocked with ip. I don't know much about the state of the art, does http over udp (quic) allow for ip address change?

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wastedpotential 1130 days ago
Yes. Packets contain a connection identifier, so the connection can continue were it left off when the client switches ip.
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