[StephenFalken]

You raise a really interesting point about the relevance of Source Routing.

Recently I read a small but significant paper by Carl A. Sunshine [1] (from the beginning of 1977) about Source Routing and some of its implications. This was written at a time when there was still a very active community researching the fundamentals of Computer Networking.

He shows how one could build an even simpler and dumber (while still functional) core computer network with no routing infrastructure (pretty amazing concept when you think of it), no global addresses and no global node naming. All that complexity would be transferred to the endpoints, making the whole network even more configurable and adaptable to topology changes. Endpoints would have a more powerful and free participation in that network. The End-to-End Principle taken to its limits.

Is there still some deep fundamental research on the feasibility of such a large scale network based on Source Routing ?

[1] Source Routing in Computer Networks http://cartap.us/p29-sunshine.pdf